



Copyriglil by Purely, Bosiou. 



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-^.y- 



MARK HANNA 

A SKETCH FROM LIFE 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



By 

SOLON LAUER, ' 

AUTHOR OF 

Life and Light from Above, 
Social Laws, Etc. 




CLEVELAND, OHIO 
NIKE PUBLISHING HOUSE 

I 9 o I 



2.5 



^.'i ■'i J 



THF LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Tv'o Copies Reoeivep 

OCT. 19 1901 

CnFVRfQHT efTTRV 




CLASS ex. XXa No. 
COPY A. 



Copyright, igoi, 
BY . 
Solon Lau'er. 



Wc^t imperial "^xzn ; 

CLEVELAND, OHIO. 



. H 2.4L 3 



TO MY JOE ( HE KNOWS ) , WHO BE- 
LIEVED IN ME WHEN OTHERS DOUBTED j 
WHOSE HEART AND BRAIN HAVE 
ANSWERED TO MY OWN, IN EVERY 
LOFTY THOUGHT OR SENTIMENT; 
WHOSE AID AND SYMPATHY WERE 
MINE WHEN FIRST I LAUNCHED MY 
LITTLE BARK UPON THE STORMY SEA 
OF LITERATURE ; THIS VOLUME, WHICH 
I WISH WERE A MORE WORTHY TRIBUTE 
OF MY APPRECIATION AND AFFECTION, 
IS INSCRIBED. 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 



As this volume goes to press, the whole coun- 
try, nay, the whole world, is stirred to its pro- 
foundest depths of feeling, over the dastardly 
assassination of President McKinley. 

This outrage is the legitimate outcome of the 
agitation which certain classes of demagogues 
have been carrying on for years. The generation 
and aggravation of class hatred, the wholesale 
denunciation of rich men, the persistent attacks 
and aggravation of class hatred, the wholesale 
charges of robbery and oppression continuously 
brought against large employers of labor, could 
not but end in violence, sooner or later. 

That this fiendish act of Czolgosz was inspired 
by his long cherished hatred of rich men is evi- / 

denced by the assassin's own words. Czolgosz is 
one of a large and growing class who suffer from 
Plutophobia. He says : ''I hope he dies. I shot 
him because it was my duty. The man who suc- 
ceeds him must not he the slave of capital, or he 
will perish, too." 

Emil Schilling, treasurer of an anarchist club 
in Cleveland, said to a reporter of the Leader : 



iv A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

''The man who shot the President knew that 
McKinley and his clique were taking millions 
from the men who produce the wealth. What 
could be more natural than that he should shoot 
himf" 

Another Individual is reported to have said that 
Csolgosz ought to have shot Mark Hanna. 

Among certain classes in this country the ha- 
tred for Mark Hanna is so intense that it would 
not have been surprising had he been included 
in the plot against McKinley's life. The idea 
has been persistently inculcated by many papers 
that Mark Hanna was the actual President, and 
McKinley only his obedient and submissive serv- 
ant. Expressions from anarchistic sympathizers 
in various quarters show too plainly that this 
poisonous seed, scattered by the hands of dema- 
gogues, has taken root among the enemies of 
government; and we may at any time expect to 
reap a further harvest of blood from these lusty 
but pernicious plants. 

According to report, Emma Goldman, "the 
High Priestess of Anarchy," and the inspiring 
angel of assassin Czolgosz, uttered the following 
sentiments in Chicago: 

''Mark Hanna has been the ruler of this coun- 
try, not McKinley. McKinley has been the most 
insignificant ruler this country has ever had. He 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. v 

has neither wit nor intelligence, hut has been a 
tool in the hands of Mark Hanna." 

That the assassination of McKInley alone is 
not sufficient to bring about the anarchist's dream 
of an earthly paradise is evidenced by her further 

remarks : 

'7 am not in a position to say who ought to be 
killed. The monopolists and the wealthy of this 
country are responsible for the existence of a 

Czolgosz." 

According to these words, the blood of Mark 
Hanna, and of the wealthy business men whose 
class interests he is mistakenly supposed to cham- 
pion, must be poured out in sacrifice upon the 
altar of liberty, before the masses can be free 
in this America. Is it surprising that the Gov- 
ernment Secret Service men have thrown a guard 
around the person of Mr. Hanna? And must we 
furnish guards for Pierpont Morgan, Russell 
Sage, John D. Rockefeller, and their kind, to pro- 
tect them from the weapons of red-eyed mad- 
men like Czolgosz? 

For years this hatred of our prosperous busi- 
ness men has been inculcated in the speeches and 
papers of socialists and anarchists. Several 
years ago, a revolutionary sheet published in 
Chicago contained the following: 



vi A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

"A LETTER TO TRAMPS." 

"Stroll you down the avenues of the rich, and 
look through the magniiicent plate windows into 
their voluptuous homes, and here you will dis- 
cover the very identical robbers who have de- 
spoiled you and yours. Then let your tragedy 
be enacted here! Azuaken them from their wan- 
ton sports at your expense. Send forth your 
petition, and let them read it by the red glare 
of destruction. Avail yourselves of those little 
methods of zvarfare which science has placed in 
the hands of the poor man, and you will become 
a power in this or any other land. Learn the use 
of explosives.'' 

This fire of hatred against the prosperous and 
wealthy, whose enterprise has given employment 
and brought ever-increasing wealth to working- 
men, is spreading far and wide. Its angry flames 
leap to the sky, and show us in their lurid light 
the forms of madmen arming for murder and de- 
struction. The horrors of revolution are upon 
us, unless this devouring fire be quenched. 

It is not enough that we shall quell the tu- 
mult of open riot whenever and wherever it 
arises. The fire that smoulders in secret may 
yet break forth and destroy the institutions of 
our nation. 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. vii 

In the dark cellars and the dusty lofts of cities 
these agents of revolution hold their secret coun- 
cils, and plot against the lives and fortunes of 
the rich and powerful. There is no open plot, 
no visible organization ; but this brotherhood of 
murderers exists, and carries on its bloody coun- 
cils in the silence and the dark. 

Its wrath is fed by all the demagogues, of 
whatever name, who cry against the rich and 
prosperous ; who magnify the poverty and suf- 
fering of the poor, and lay the real and fancied 
wrongs of workingmen at the doors of those 
who are victorious in life's battle. 

Thousands of workingmen fall a ready prey to 
demagogues, who come like wolves in sheep's 
clothing to breed strife and discontent in Labor's 
fold. They listen to the poisoned words of mal- 
ice, and the words rankle in their hearts. It is 
but a step from discontent to violence. 

Although thousands of workingmen know that 
Mark Hanna has ever been a friend to Labor, 
there are other thousands who have listened to 
the envenomed words of demagogues until they 
are convinced that Mark Hanna is their enemy 
and oppressor and that President McKinley was 
his meek and submissive slave. This sentiment 
grew and strengthened until it found a logical 
expression through the murderous hand of Czol- 
gosz, extended in Judas-treachery to take Mc- 
Kinley 's life. 



viii A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

The assassination of McKinley is of far more 
direful significance to the nation than was the as- 
sassination of either Lincoln or Garfield. The 
murder of Lincoln was the last convulsive effort 
of the expiring serpent of vSecession, fixing its 
poisoned fangs in the flesh of him who had given 
it a fatal blow. 

The killing of Garfield was the act of a mad- 
man, whose brain, naturally weak and unbal- 
anced, had become inflamed by the hatred en- 
gendered in party strife. Dreadful as it was, the 
act had only a local and temporary significance, 
so far as its motive was concerned. 

But the death-blow to McKinley was aimed at 
the wealth and prosperity of the nation. It was 
inspired by class hatred. It was insane Poverty 
striking blindly at the form of Wealth. It was 
the act of a Samson, in blind rage seeking to pull 
down the temple of national prosperity, whose 
fall should be his own destruction. 

To the befogged brain of the anarchist Czol- 
gosz, McKinley and his supporters represented 
the brutal hand of corporate Wealth, snatching 
from starving Labor the crust of meager oppor- 
tunity which Unionism has thus far insured for 
its subsistence. 

But it is not alone the anarchist who takes this 
dismal and distorted view of the present indus- 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. ix 

trial situation in America. Czolgosz has simply 
given expression in action to what has long been 
expressed in language and cartoon. 

It is not enough for us to stamp out the anarchy 
of deed; we must also stamp out the anarchy of 
the printed and spoken word. It is not sufficient 
for us to imprison or hang the anarchist who re- 
sorts to force ; we must suppress in every legiti- 
mate way the demagoguery which inspires him. 
It is of no use to brush away the web, and leave 
the spider which is weaving it. 

Czolgosz struck a blow for liberty and equality, 
firmly believing that these great principles would 
be subserved by the assassination of McKinley 
and the intimidation of his supporters. The power 
of the demagogue is always a despotic power ; and 
this act of Czolgosz, which expressed the spirit 
of demagoguery in its last and logical application, 
was one of the most striking examples of despotic 
power in the world's history. This point was so 
forcibly and eloquently brought out in an address 
given in Plymouth Church, Cleveland, by Mr. J. 
G. W. Cowles, a prominent business man of 
Cleveland and an active member of the Chamber 
of Commerce, that I am constrained to quote 
some of his words: 

"Anarchy," he said, ''which professes to aim 
its blows at despotism, is itself the worst of 



X A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

despotism. When Czolgosz seized the pistol to 
shoot our President, he grasped at absohite and 
despotic power. Czolgosz already had the power 
of the ballot, the same power which every Amer- 
ican citizen possesses. He was not satisfied with 
that. 

Seven millions of American citizens by their 
suffrage made McKinley President. One man 
with his deadly pistol removed him from that of- 
fice. One man reached forth his frenzied hand, 
and the destinies of a nation trembled in the bal- 
ance. One man smote the nation's head, and the 
heart of the nation bled. 

The Czar of Russia does not exercise such ab- 
solute and despotic power as this man usurped 
and wielded, in the sacred name of liberty. The 
worst despotism which the world has seen never 
equaled this of anarchy's apostle Czolgosz in this 
free land of ours. 

Are we to tolerate this hideous form of despot- 
ism in cur midst? Life and liberty are not in- 
aHenable where one man can seize and wield so 
absolute a power. This is a form of despotism 
which we must drive forever from our shores. 
Life and liberty are not secure, where anarchy is 
tolerated." 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. xi 

HANNA AND McKINLEY. 

A friend of Mr. Hanna, who has known him 
for years, said to the writer : ''Governor Mc- 
Kinley was fortunate in having Marcus A. Han- 
na for his personal friend and poHtical adviser, 
and the manager of his campaigns ; and Mr. Han- 
na was equally fortunate in his alliance with Mc- 
Kinley. It was a compact of power with popular- 
ity, which made both men greater and more 
successful, and more useful to the public. The 
personal affection and devotion of each to the 
other was honorable alike to both, and an example 
of the best qualities of friendship among men." 

It is safe to say that no heart has been more 
cruelly hurt by the stroke that laid McKinley low 
than the big heart of his nearest and dearest po- 
litical friend, Mark Hanna. This stroke has 
added several years to the burden of age, which 
already bore heavily upon Mr. Hanna's shoul- 
ders. Since the dreadful news of that black Fri- 
day, when the heart of the President began to 
fail, Mr. Hanna has been as one crushed by an 
irresistible power. His face is drawn, his shoul- 
ders droop, and he leans heavily upon his cane. 
His friend, for whom Mr. Hanna laid such a 
sacrifice of health and labor upon the altar of his 
country's welfare, is gone. 



xii A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

The strongest bond between Mr. McKinley 
and Mr. Hanna was the tic of an enduring friend- 
ship. Next to this came the affinity of political 
sympathy. They believed in the same great 
principles. They clasped hands to work for the 
same broad ends. 

The notion that Mr. Hanna dictated the po- 
litical policy of the President can be entertained 
only by those who are not familiar wath the char- 
acter of the two men. They were one in an en- 
during friendship, whose foundations lay far 
deeper than the community of their political in- 
terests. They were one in their adherence to cer- 
tain great principles which the Republican party 
represents. But far above the personal aims of 
either was the starry emblem of their country's 
welfare, which they ever kept in view. 

There are ignorant and malicious minds who 
will see, in the death of President McKinley, the 
setting of Mr. Hanna's star of destiny : and in the 
unutterable grief that mantles him in gloom these 
will see chiefly the regret of a man disappointed 
of his political aspirations, and deprived of the 
chief means by which his own imperious will was 
executed. 

/Mr. Hanna has been universally known as the 
friend of President McKinley. Is it not possi- 
ble that this intimate relation has somewhat ob- 



A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. xiii 

scured the vision of his own character and at- 
tainments? My own beUef is that the influence 
of Mr. Hanna in American poHtics has been 
chiefly due to his own quahties as a man. His 
strength, sagacity, poHtical insight, his force of 
character, his quahties of leadership, his inti- 
mate acquaintance with the business interests of 
the country, must all be taken into account^^/^ 
/'Mr. Hanna's friend is dead. Mr. Hanna's 
power of leadership and command remain. We 
shall now see whether this man's star is a sun, 
or merely a planet, reflecting the light of a Pres- 
idential orb. If my estimate of Mr. Hanna's 
character is correct, his star of destiny will not 
be darkened by this eclipse that has fallen upon 
the nation's chief. 

^This orb that rose above the smoke-stained 
city by the lake is not an errant comet, with men- 
ace in its train to all the people. It is not a 
planet, deriving its light from a Presidential Sun 
to whose system it was attached as a leading 
planet. It is a self-illumined Sun, a source of 
light and power ; and though it may never shine 
from the President's chair at Washington, it will 
still illumine the councils of the nation, and lead 
its retinue of stars and planets along the track of 
the national zodiac. 

y Mr. Hanna, in other words, will not drop into 



xiv A PREFATORY POSTSCRIPT. 

obscurity because of the loss of his friend, our 
President McKinley. Mr. Hanna, hke all men of 
great natural power, intuitively knows his proper 
place. He has often ridiculed the idea of a presi- 
dential nomination for himself ; but he knows his 
power as a leader of men, and will not abdicate 
it while life remains to him. In the councils 
of the nation his voice will still be heard; and 
because it is a calm, sane voice, the voice of a 
large experience, the voice of a practical wisdom, 
it will -be heeded, and its utterance will have the 
weight of a natural and underived authority. 

His character as a statesman has been slowly 
but surely emerging from the mists of popular ig- 
norance and misunderstanding; and it will yet 
shine out clearly, by its own light, as one of the 
most forceful, acute, able, that has arisen in the 
nation's horizon. Mr. Hanna, as McKinley's 
friend, would live for many years in the fond 
memory of McKinley's hosts of admirers ; but 
Mr. Hanna, the Senator, will be remembered for 
his own strong qualities of leadership — exerted 
during one of the most important epochs of the 
nation's history — long after the popular concep- 
tion of his relation to President McKinley has 
been obscured bv the mists of time. 



MARK HANNA 



MARK HANNA; A SKETCH FROM LIFE. 



The noble Cato, when someone suggested that 
there ought to be a monument in memory of his 
services to his country, repHed: ''It is better 
that people should ask why Cato has not a mon- 
ument than to ask why he has/' 

There are probably many people in the United 
States who will ask ''Why this sketch of Mark 
Hanna?" 

When President Charles F. Thwing, at the 
Alumni banquet given in celebration of the sev- 
enty-fifth anniversary of Western Reserve Uni- 
versity, introduced Senator Marcus A. Hanna 
as one of the speakers, he remarked that it was 
only after repeated solicitation, by letter, tele- 
phone, and finally by personal interview, that he 
had succeeded in obtaining the Senator's consent 
to his request. 

"The Senator," he said, "asked me why I 
wanted him to come out here today, among all 
these college professors. I told him," continued 
President Thwing, in his genial manner, "that 
I had three reasons for asking him. I said to 
him, I want you, first, because you are a Senator 



4 MARK HAN N A. 

from Ohio, and Western Reserve University, as 
an Ohio institution, has a claim on you; second, 
because you were once a student in Western Re- 
serve ; third, because you are a jolly good fel- 
low! And," continued President Thwing, "on 
the third ground he said he would come ; and here 
he is !" 

The rousing ovation which greeted the Senator, 
as he smilingly stepped forward to address the 
Alumni, proved conclusively that he was wanted, 
on all these grounds and more. A chorus of yells, 
from throats long trained to that exercise, showed 
that the younger members of the company wel- 
comed Mr. Hanna especially as "a jolly good fel- 
low." 

"What's the matter with Hanna? He's all 
right !" concluded the vociferous greeting ; and 
Mr. Hanna proceeded, in his own characteristic 
manner, to make some remarks appropriate to the 
occasion ; showing, by his vigor of language, his 
pungent wit, his keen and incisive thought, his 
free and natural gestures, that an intellect natu- 
rally strong, and cultivated by years of exercise 
on the multifarious problems of practical busi- 
ness, may shine to advantage, even in the pres- 
ence of minds trained in the subtleties of mathe- 
matics and the classic languages. 



MARK H ANN A. 5 

HIS NAME ON ALL LIPS. 

In introducing Mr. Hanna to the readers of this 
sketch, I might add several reasons to those given 
by President Thwing for introducing him to a 
learned assembly of College Alumni. Mr. Hanna 
is a unique figure in our political world. After 
years of successful business experience, control- 
ling some of the largest commercial interests in 
Ohio, Mr. Hanna entered the field of political 
work. His rapid rise to a power such as per- 
haps no man in America has ever attained before 
makes a story which ought to appeal to all Amer- 
ican citizens who admire genius, in whatever 
field it may exercise itself, and who applaud suc- 
cess, whenever it is the fruit of natural ability. 
His name today is on all lips. No man in the 
United States is more talked and written about. 

In England he is called "the King-maker," and 
people greedily read every item concerning him. x. 
In this country, to strike the name of Mark 
Hanna from our public prints would leave great 
gaps of white in thousands of newspapers and 
magazines ; and scores of cartoonists would find 
not perhaps their occupation but certainly their 
most fertile subject gone. 

The very newsboys in the city streets know 
him by sight as well as reputation. Not lon^f 



6 MARK H ANN A. 

since, Mr. Hanna was on a street car in Cleve- 
land which was temporarily held by a blockade. 
The newsboys and street gamins saw the back of 
his head through the car window. At once a 
shout arose : ''There's Mark Hanna ; hello. 
Mark!" "Naw, it isn't!" "It is! It's Mark 
Hanna! Hello, Mark!" Perhaps Mr. Hanna's 
neck grew a bit red back of the ears at this noisy 
demonstration ; but he kept his temper. He is 
the man of the people, like Napoleon. 

On another occasion Mr. Hanna was being 
driven in a cab through one of the back streets 
of New York city. The cab stopped, from some 
obstruction. A grimy newsboy saw Mr. Hanna 
through the cab window, and shouted, "Hello, 
Mark Hanna!" 

This universal recognition is no less a compli- 
ment to the cartoonists than to Mr. Hanna, for 
it is largely through their art that Mr. Hanna's 
features have become so widely known. At bot- 
tom, the success of a cartoon depends as much 
upon its presenting a recognizable likeness as 
upon the idea to be conveyed. It is needless to 
say that the cartoonists do not flatter Mr. Hanna 
in their pictures ; but even Mr. Hanna himself is 

forced to admit that some of them resemble him 
about as much as certain photographs that have 
been made of him I 



MARKHANNA. 7 

An amusing bit of news appeared recently in 
a New York paper. It is presented here for the 
edification of the reader. 

"Mark A. Hanna to the bar," thundered Levy^ 
the court officer of the 121st street poHce court, 
yesterday morning. 

Magistrate Zeller straightened up as he heard 
the name of the Ohio Senator. 

At the officer's summons there appeared before 
the bar a small boy. 

"Where is Mark A. Hanna?" asked the mag- 
istrate. 

"Here I is," piped the voice of the small pris- 
oner. 

He was Mark Hanna, of 140 East I32d street 
and he was accused by Louis Kortis, of i East 
I32d street, of stealing enameled letters from his 
window. 

Several small boys corroborated Kortis' story 

of the theft. 

"What have you to say to the charge?" asked 
Magistrate Zeller, sternly. 

Mark Hanna dashed away a gush of unmanly 
tears with a small and grimy fist. "These fellers 
are my political enemies, boss," he said. Where- 
upon the magistrate ordered his discharge. 

"You bear a famous name," said the magis- 
trate. 



8 MARKHANNA. 

"Yes, sir," said the lad, "but it ain't my 
fault. My father is a good Democrat." 

"Yes, thank God," cried Mrs. Hanna, who ac- 
companied her boy, as she led him away. 

A PERSONAL INTERVIEW. 

I have, then, written this sketch of Mr. Hanna 
firstly, because I think the public wants it. Sec- 
ondly, I know something about him. I was born 
and "raised" not twenty miles from Cleveland. 
Anyone who has lived very long in the vicinity 
of Cleveland could not help knowing a great 
deal about Mark Hanna. The city bears his 
impress. He was an old story in Cleveland be- 
fore the country at large ever heard of him. 
When I began writing this sketch, I asked the city 
editor of the Leader whether that paper had 
ever published a biographical sketch of Mr. Han- 
na. If so, I wanted to utilize it. All is grist that 
comes to my literary mill. 

The Editor laughed. "To print a biographical 
sketch of Mark Hanna in Cleveland," he said, 
"would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Every- 
body knows all about him. But if there is any- 
thing in particular that you want to find out, 
ask the old business men." I did so. What I 
did not know, they told me. 



MARK HANNA. 9 

My first personal acquaintance with Mr. Hanna 
was one morning two years ago, when I called 
at his residence on the West Side, with letters of 
introduction from the son of a former President 
and others. Mr. Hanna was at home, reading 
the morning paper. He was not in the best 
of humor at first. His rheumatism was troubling 
him. But he handed me a chair, and soon became 
cordial and communicative. 

I got my first rapid sketch for this pen-picture 
of him then. He impressed me as one of the 
keenest, clearest-headed men I had ever met. 
His eyes were like electric lights. His words 
were clean-cut, and went straight to the mark, 
like bullets to the bull's-eye. He expressed his 
opinion freely, on certain public questions. 

"What do you think of the laws that are being 
framed against the so-called trusts ?" I asked him. 
"They're all unconstitutional, — every one of 
them!" he exclaimed, with a frankness that sur- 
prised me. I had looked for a cautious answer, — 
the answer of the politician. I received the frank, 
unhesitating answer of the independent, fearless 
business man. It is a marvel to me how this 
blunt, honest, out-spoken man has ever succeeded 
as he has in politics. In politics, honesty is not 
considered the best policy. The politician is sup- 
posed to weigh every word he utters, to determine 






lo MARKHANNA. 

its effect upon voters. He cannot tell the public 
what he thinks, but only what his party thinks, 
and expresses in its platform. His . utterance is 
always official, never personal. He has no indi- 
vidual opinions, — or none to speak of ! 

I saw at once that Mr. Hanna dominated party 
conventions and party platforms because he is 
greater than they are. He knows it, and acts 
it. He knows that masses of men follow 'leaders 
who are strong enough to command them. He 
knows that masses of men take their opinions 
from strong leaders. This is not exactly in ac- 
cord with some of our democratic ideas, but it 
is a fact. 

I will not betray Mr. Hanna's confidence by 
repeating all that he said. I do not fancy that 
he would object, but it would hurt the feelings of 
some sincere people. Mr. Hanna probably did 
not say anything to me that he was afraid to say 
in public, if occasion should arise. 

With reference to the "anti-imperialists" and 
their work, he expressed unutterable disgust. He 
seemed tc think that it was the expression not so 
much of perversity as of imbecility. That was 
certainly a charitable view of it! His contempt 
for Boston was unmistakable. It was plain that' 
Ihe considered that place the hot-bed of all politi- 
cal heresy. Old women, garrulous gossips, med- 



MARKHANNA. ii 

dling with matters beyond their understanding; 
sentimental quibblers, utterly lacking in com- 
mon sense ; such were the people who were harry- 
ing the Administration with their anti-imperial- 
ist nonsense! 

But it was soon time for Mr. Hanna to go to 
town. He rose and pressed a button. A car- 
riage, drawn by a handsome span of horses, was 
driven to the door. Mr. Hanna courteously in- 
vited me to ride with him. During the pleasant 
drive through the winding boulevards of the park 
we chatted of various things. Mr. Hanna re- 
vealed the sunny, genial side of his nature, which 
is sometimes concealed from unwelcome visitors. 

I remarked that I hoped Mr. McKinley would 
be nominated for a second term, and that Mr. 
Hanna would manage the campaign, 

"He will be nominated," repHed Mr Hanna, in 
a tone that indicated the certainty of Fate ; "but 
I must keep out of it. I have had two serious 
attacks of heart trouble, and my physicians have 
warned me against all manner of excitement." 

How well Mr. Hanna has heeded that warning, 
the public very well knows. His hteart was in 
his work. It had to keep throbbing. Physicians' 
warnings were wasted. I believe Mr. Hanna 
would have died in his place rather than relin- 
quish what he believed to be his duty. Death will 



12 



MARK HANNA. 



sometime stop his restless activity; but the fear 
of death will never do so, 

AN APOLOGY FOR MR. HANNA. 

As I said before, I have written this sketch 
of Mr. Hanna because I think the public wants 
it. When I say the public, I mean a very large 
part of the people of the United States, and a 
goodly proportion of the people of all English- 
speaking countries. There is a considerable ele- 
ment in the United States, however, that not only 
does not want to know anything about Mark 
Hanna, — at least, anything good, — but that will 
raise a hue and cry against the writer for at- 
tempting to tell them anything. 

To them, Mark Hanna is a Monster. He rep- 
resents all that is worst in our civilization. He 
is a scamp Jupiter, who has . got the Olympian 
throne by purchase, and has corrupted all the 
other gods. He builds earthly thrones of gold, 
and sets rulers thereon, who meekly do his w^ill. 
He is the Boss Deity of the political Olympus, 
with countless legions of purchased angels to 
do his bidding. To these people he is the typical 
plutocrat ; and gold, and Pluto of the infernal 
underworld, are the allied forces of his corrupt- 
ed kingdom. 



MARK HAN N A. 13 

The intensity of the hatred felt by some people 
in this country for Mark Hanna cannot be ex- 
pressed in words. Mr. Hanna does not, cannot 
fully realize it ; and it is well that he cannot. I 
know many Republicans who speak of Mr. Han- 
na in a tone of apology. They have heard so 
much about his rascality that they begin to think 
it is true. They have not heard the things they 
ought to hear. 

I know other Republicans who waver in their 
loyalty to the party because of this feeling that 
Mr. Hanna has become its ruler, and that he is 
not as good as he ought to be. One of my chief 
reasons for writing this sketch is to tell these 
people a few things about Mr. Hanna which may 
serve to give them a juster estimate of his charac- 
ter. 

I do not conceal my preference for the Re- 
publican party in American politics. No party 
is perfect. Political affiliation is at best a com- 
promise, a matter of expediency. But the Re- 
publican party to my mind is the party of safety, 
the party of conservatism, and I wish it well. I 
do not want any of its friends and supporters to 
leave it because of ignorance and misunderstand- 
ing concerning Mr. Hanna and his work. I write 
not so much in the interest of Mr. Hanna person- 



14 MARKHANNA. 

ally as in the interests of the party and the polit- 
ical policy which he so prominently represents. 

NOT AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT. 

In sending out this little sketch to the public, I 
wish it distinctly understood that it is in no sense 
an official document. Mr Hanna has not been 
asked to sanction or endorse it in any way. He 
has had no part whatever in the preparation of it. 
It has no relation whatever, occult or otherwise, 
to any so-called "Hanna boom." It is simply one 
of a projected series of biographical sketches, 
which, when completed, will include a number 
of the prominent men of the day. 

Mr. Hanna personally is averse to any formal 
publication of his achievements, either in busi- 
ness or politics. His career has been that of a 
public-spirited citizen, who has succeeded in 
business as many other men have done, by virtue 
of natural talent and close application, and whose 
political notoriety has been very largely thrust 
upon him, as a consequence of activities entered 
upon from motives of disinterested patriotism. 

This sketch, therefore, so far from claiming 
any sanction or authority from Mr. Hanna, or 
having any official relation to his past or future 
career, is rather one of those afflictions which 



MARKHANNA. 15 

come to most men who achieve eminence in any 
particular direction, and whose Hves therefore 
become to a certain extent pubHc property. 

Mr. Hanna has become so vitally connected 
with our national history that people wish to 
know more about his personality. Where others 
might do worse, even if some should do better, it 
is no sin for the author of this essay to offer it 
to the public, in the hope that it may both serve 
a growing public interest that is largely pardon- 
able, and present a juster estimate of Mr. Han- 
na's character than that commonly promulgated 
by his political enemies. If it shall give his 
many friends and admirers some pleasure and 
satisfaction in the latter respect, and serve to fix 
for future historians some of the fleeting facts in 
the career of a unique and forceful character, its 
main purpose will have been accomplished. 

OUR INDUSTRIAL HEROES. 

The reader will note that I do not deal with 
Mr. Hanna as an individual alone, but also as a 
man representing a large and increasing class, — 
the business men, the empire-builders, the men 
w^ho are laying the foundations of a new and 
grand civilization. 

This is the age of science, invention, manu- 



i6 MARK H ANN A. 

facture, trade. Antiquated dreamers, with va- 
cant eyes turned in upon their own misty spec- 
ulation, denounce it as a gross and materiaUstic 
age. They mourn the absence of sentiment, 
poetry, the fine arts. To them, these men of af- 
fairs are so many great brutes, trampHng down 
their fellows in their mad rush for material treas- 
ures. They do not see the real work which 
these men are doing, in redeeming the earth from 
the wild forces of nature, and preparing it to be 
the home of such a civilization as the human 
race has never dreamed of in the past. 

I take it upon myself to defend this class of 
men from the aspersions of their traducers. I 
take it upon myself to say some good words for 
this material world and its material interests. If 
this is materialism, let the critics make the most 
of it. 

I believe in this world, and in the heroes who 
are making it habitable. Where shall we find the 
greatest heroes today? Certainly not on the field 
of battle, though war has brought forth brave 
men and true, even in these days. 

But in the field of invention, manufacture and 
trade, in science, literature and politics, there are 
characters as worthy of the pen of a Plutarch as 
any that the classic writer rescued from the gath- 



MARKHANNA. 17 

ering shades of oblivion and made immortal with 
the touch of his genius. 

When a Plutarch looks, he sees what escapes 
the eyes of common men ; and at his glance, lo, 
a race of heroes springs into being, where before 
were sordid traders and haggling merchants. 

The eye of genius touches with its revealing ray 
the masses of struggling men who fill our fac- 
tories, our mills, our mines, who dig and carve 
and pound and plow and reap, who sit beside 
strange machines, or walk among whirling wheels 
and buzzing bands and rattling chains; and be- 
hold, a race of gods appears, creating out of chaos 
and night the forms of use and beauty that shall 
make this world a heaven and human life a song 
of joy. 

Who shall say that these characters are not 
worthy to furnish subjects for epic verse or he- 
roic annals ? In this warfare with the brute forces 
of nature, every soldier who does his duty is 
worthy of a laurel wreath ; and the bold com- 
manders who lead and direct these warriors, who 
plan and execute vast campaigns against the 
brute forces of nature, — shall we not sing of 
these as Virgil of old sang of "Arms and the 
man" ? Shall we not write their names upon our 
scroll of fame, that they may shine forth in sue- 



i8 MARKHANNA. 

ceeding ages like the names of ancient Greece 
and Rome? 

Greater are these names than any that have 
graced the monuments of the buried past ; for the 
names of the men of old are chiefly the names of 
destroyers and ravagers ; the lions and tigers of 
the race, whose strength and courage and fierce- 
ness we admire, but whose deeds cannot com- 
pare with the deeds of these mighty builders of 
the modern world, before whose all-conquering 
arms Nature surrenders her deepest secrets and 
pours forth her hidden treasures of energy and 
substance to enrich and beautify the earth. 

The men of old conquered savage tribes, or 
poured the blood of their own brethren as liba- 
tions to the god of ambition. These warriors 
fight with the forces of the under-world, and out 
of darkness and the pit wrest light and glory for 
their fellow men. 

They grasp the very stars in their orbits, and 
fasten them to their standards to light the fields 
of their glory. Suns and moons are their tro- 
phies, brought back in triumph from cosmic expe- 
ditions. 

Space yields her treasures to these bold world- 
conquerors. The sea and the earth-deeps are 
transparent to their eyes. 



MARKHANNA. 19 

They toss mountains from hand to hand. They 
drink up rivers^ or turn them into new chan- 
nels. 

They scatter ships Hke birds, which in their 
strong flight go to the bounds of the sea, and re- 
turn not fruitless. 

Over the far-reaching continents fly their 
dragon-trains, more wondrous than any miracle 
of old. 

Sea murmurs to sea, in the mystic whisper of 
the telegraph. The lightnings are our messen- 
gers, which obey our word. 

Who hath seen the like of it ? History is dumb. 

What is the secret of Mr. Hanna's remarkable 
power and influence in the political world? 

It is not easy to account for any sort of great 
success. At the bottom of every great achieve- 
ment lies a character that is great. 

Success comes to the strong, the brave, the in- 
telligent. It does not come to weaklings, to cow- 
ards, to dull and sluggish intellects. 

The whole world applauds success. These men 
who can do what other men only dream of do- 
ing, — these men who hitch their wagons to the 
stars, and are pulled by the very power of the 
Cosmos, — these athletes in the world's Olympian 
games, conquering all who come against them, 



20 MARK H ANN A. 

standing with folded arms awaiting new assail- 
ants, conscious of superior power, strong in the 
victories they have won ; — these men, I say, fas- 
cinate the multitude, and easily wear the laurels 
which are placed upon their brows. 

THE LION IN HIS DEN. 

Mr. Hanna is a Colossus, who tosses commer- 
cial interests and political offices like baubles. 
Senators and Congressmen, millionaire business 
managers, aspirants for political favors, newspa- 
per men, even clergymen and college presidents, 
jostle together in the corridors leading to his pri- 
vate office in the Perry-Payne Building, Cleve- 
land. 

If you wish to see him, you approach the rail- 
ing that separates the numerous business offices 
of M. A. Hanna & Co. from the outside world. 

Here a colored porter takes your card, and car- 
ries it to some inner sanctum, where it is received 
by Mr. Hanna's private secretary. 

If you are a ''persona non grata," you are re- 
spectfully informed that Mr. Planna is too busy 
to see you today. If your business is deemed 
of some importance, it may be disposed of by the 
private secretary, who will meet you, when your 
turn comes, in his private office. Meantime, per- 



MARKHANNA. 21 

haps, you sit on a long bench in company with 
others who are waiting. 

If your business really justifies a personal in- 
terview with Mr. Hanna, you will be informed 
that Mr. Hanna will see you, as soon as he is at 
liberty; and you will be invited to leave the ple- 
beian bench in the corridor for a seat in the office 
of the secretary. 

When your turn arrives, you are ushered by the 
secretary into Mr. Hanna's private office. 

Your reception will depend upon your per- 
sonal relation to Mr. Hanna, and the importance 
of your business. 

Letters of introduction, from whatever source, 
count for but little. Mr. Hanna is not awed by 
great names. 

Mr. Hanna is no snob, no aristocrat, in the or- 
dinary sense of the word; but he is a man who 
can read character by its natural signs, and who 
recognizes no other passport to his favor. 

When you have been introduced to him, if you 
are a stranger, he calmly awaits the statement of 
your business. He has no time for mere words. 
What you would say, you must say briefly, con- 
cisely. 

He looks you through and through with his 
keen dark eyes. They are searchlights, from 



22 MARK HANNA. 

which no secret can be hidden. If you are dis- 
sembling, you will not deceive those eyes. What- 
ever your words may say, those eyes will detect 
the lie in your mind. 

It is said that one of the principal elements in 
the success of Napoleon was his ability to esti- 
mate the character of his associates. In the busi- 
ness and political world, this faculty is quite as 
important as in the military, and Mr. Hanna pos- 
sesses it to a remarkable degree. 

When you have stated your business, Mr. Han- 
na will probably ask you a few quiet questions. 
You will perceive that he does not waste words 
upon superficial matters, but each question goes 
to the bottom of the business. Practical above 
all things, he seeks always for some guarantee of 
success. It is not a question whether the plan 
be a good one, — but, will it work in practice? 
If it will not, Mr. Hanna will have none of it. 

As he sits quietly at his desk, with a certain 
massive dignity and poise, you feel that you are 
in the presence of a man of power. He is not a 
mere figurehead. He is the man who does things, 
— large, masculine, with a certain quiet command 
in tone and gesture which indicates the natural 
leader of men. 

His mind acts quickly but powerfully upon 



MARK H ANN A, 23 

whatever question comes before him. He has 
the Napoleonic grasp of details, and his self-reli- 
ance is born of the consciousness of his own 
power. 

In his business councils he is what Grant was 
in his councils of war. He sits quietly listening 
to the various remarks, reserving his own. When 
all others have spoken, he gives his opinion, in a 
few quiet words ; and his business associates as- 
sert that he is almost invariably correct. 

As you talk with him, his secretary enters with 
a dozen letters, and presents them for Mr. Han- 
na's reply or signature. Turning to his desk, he 
with a few strokes of the peh disposes of ques- 
tions involving perhaps thousands of dollars, and 
the destinies of hundreds of men. He turns the 
searching power of his strong mind upon each 
letter, and you catch perhaps a few words of his 
intructions to the secretary, — "Tell Mr. Cortel- 
you" — or, "Write the Senator that," etc. 

Having disposed of these matters, he turns to 
you again, and without the loss of a single thread 
of your discourse, resumes the consideration of 
your business. 

You are inevitably impressed with his immense 
power of application and concentration of mind. 
Quietly, with no display of effort, as an ocean 



24 MARK H ANN A. 

liner turns in the harbor, his strong intellect ap- 
plies itself to each matter, weighs each statement 
and each argument, and renders its decision in a 
few well-chosen words. 

Here is a type of intellect which has not yet 
been included in the world's category of genius; 
the type of the successful business man. '• 

But why should it not be so included? Are 
the classic languages and the higher mathematics 
the only worthy field for the exercise of intellect- 
ual powers? 

Must a man devote the powers of his intellect 
to problems of physical science, or to abstract 
questions of law and ethics, in order to be recog- 
nized as a man of culture? 

In the complex afifairs of the modern industrial 
world are problems quite as worthy of intellectual 
power as are the more classic problems of purely 
professional life. 

When you have in a brief interview conclud- 
ed your business with Mr. Hanna, you retire, to 
pass, perhaps, in the corridor, a Senator or two 
who have called to pay their respects, or a half- 
dozen coal or street car magnates, who have come 
to discuss with Mr. Hanna some business project. 
How this man can manage so many various af- 
fairs, commercial and political, and manage them 



MARKHANNA. 25 

all so successfully, is a mystery to those who do 
not appreciate the immense native strength of his 
intellect, cultivated by many years of application 
to complex and weighty problems. 

MR. HANNA A PHILANTHROPIST. 

Mark Hanna is no aristocrat, in the common 
sense of that term. He is a good fellow, acces- 
sible to his friends and to those who have any 
real business with him. He is full of kind im- 
pulses, though his blunt manner at times might 
seem to belie the statement. 

Those who know him intimately could give 
many instances of his generosity toward worthy 
causes and individuals. 

This man, whom his enemies picture as a fat 
and brutal tyrant, driving men to do his imperi- 
ous will by the sheer power of brute authority, 
is at heart tender, benevolent, generous. 

There is not a church society, not a hospital or 
rescue home, not a society of Sisters, not a char- 
itable institution of any kind in Cleveland that 
does not in the hour of its need turn to this im- 
perious tyrant, and receive of his substance the 
aid required ; and as for cases of individual char- 
ity, they are too numerous to mention, even If It 
could be done without the violation of a sacred 
confidence. /'' 



26 MARK HAN N A. 

It is not alone the politician in want of a job 
who seeks the ear of Mr. Hanna; but scores of 
persons in need of assistance for themselves or for 
some public cause come to his office in the Perry- 
Payne Building, and not one is ignored or slight- 
ed. 

If Mr. Hanna knows how to disburse dollars 
for political purposes, he knows also how to dis- 
pense them for charitable ends. There is no rec- 
ord of his benefactions, and he would not al- 
low it to be published, if there were; but the 
curious might learn of many a generous and 
praiseworthy act which should go far toward 
softening the aspersions of his enemies, if it were 
known to the general public. 
ty" Mr. Hanna has been for many years President 

of the Board of Trustees for the Huron St. Hos- 
pital in Cleveland, and has helped the institu- 
tion with money and with counsel. His recent 
gift of $50,000 to Kenyon College is not large 
enough to attract general attention in these days 
of princely gifts to educational institutions, but 
it is worthy of note as one of many instances 
of generosity on the part of this much-misunder- 
X, stood and slandered man. 

The usefulness of a prosperous business man 
to the community, however, is not to be judged 



MARKHANNA. 27 

exclusively or even chiefly by his pubHc or pri- 
vate gifts of money. The best gift of any man 
to the pubHc is, after all, the man himself. If he 
well serves the public interests in his business, if 
he employs many rrfen, and treats them with jus- 
tice and generosity, he is a public benefactor, 
though he never gave a dollar to charity or edu- 
cation. 

MR. HANNA AND THE WORKINGMEN. 

In his relation to the thousands of working- 
men who are employed in the various enterprises 
managed by Mr. Hanna, we see the real character 
of the man revealed. Mr. Hanna's men do not 
strike. If they have a grievance, Mr. Hanna's 
door is open. They can come in and state it. 

In the coal mines, the shipyards, and on the 
street railway lines managed by Mr. Hanna, there 
has never been a strike. Instead, there may be 
seen at the offices various testimonials from the 
employees bearing witness to the just and gener- 
ous treatment accorded them by Mr. Hanna. 

After the great strike of the employees of the 
Big Consolidated, in the summer of '99, the em- 
ployees on Mr. Hanna's lines, the Little Consoli- 
dated, were presented with $5,000, to be divided 
among them, in consideration of their loyalty 
to the company's interests. 



28 MARK HANNA. 

During the summer just past ('oi) the wages 

of all the street railway employees were volun- 
tarily raised by Mr. Hanna ; and in recognition 

of this act the employees prepared and signed 

a testimonial of their gratitude, which is now on 

file in Supt. Mulherne's office. 

Is this the "bloated aristocrat" we see pictured 
in the cartoons of the Democratic and Populist pa- 
pers? 

Is this the man who drives his Juggernaut car 
of wealth over the prostrate forms of the nation's 
workingmen ? 

Is this the friend and champion of "the trusts," 
who squeezes the life-blood of labor to make rich 
wine for bloated capitalists? 

Let our comic artists lampoon Mr. Hanna, the 
politician, if they must, for that is a part of the 
game of politics ; but let them recognize the real 
character of Mr. Hanna the man, the friend of 
capital and labor alike, who stands for co-oper- 
ation between work and wealth, with equal jus- 
tice to both. 

^ It is easy for the demagogue to point to Mr. 
Hanna's wealth, or to his business relations with 
great corporations, and by so doing arouse the 
envy and discontent of workingmen who do not 
know his real attitude toward labor ; but his own 



MARKHANNA. 29 

employees know of his justice and genet osity, 
and have only words of praise for him. 

In these days of strife between the corpora- 
tions and the labor unions, it should be known, 
to Mr. Hanna's credit among workingmen, that 
he was the first man in our industrial history to 
recognize and respect a labor union. 

Mr. Hanna's political policy is based upon the 
idea that success and prosperity for the capital- 
ist means success and prosperity for the men in 
his employ. He recognizes the right of working- 
men to organize in the interests of better service 
and higher wages. 

He deplores strikes and lockouts, and justifies 
them only as a last resort, in the interest of jus- 
tice. He believes in arbitration between employ- 
er and employee, whenever there is a real griev- 
ance on either side. 

Acts of arbitrary authority he does not sanction, 
whether committed by the capitalist or the work- 
ingmen. Thus he stands as a representative of 
the interests of both capital and labor ; although in 
the popular mind he seems to be the partisan of 
trusts and corporations. 

There is no doubt but that Mr. Hanna's posi- 
tion as Chairman of the National Republican 
Committee, in which it became his duty to assess 



30 MARK HAN N A. 

the business men of the country for campaign 
expenses, has prejudiced him in the minds of 
very many, who saw, in his intimate relation 
to the weahhy firms and corporations of the coun- 
try, evidence of hostihty toward the working peo- 
ple. But if Mr. Hanna's theory of the commun- 
ity of interest between capital and labor is correct, 
the more money he drew from the wealthy, to 
defend the business interests of the country, the 
better it was for the working classes, who were 
bound to share the ensuing general prosperity. 

Certain it is that genuine prosperity cannot be 
the exclusive lot of any particular class. Pros- 
perity which is based upon real production must 
be, in the nature of things, universally diffused. 
Whatever increases production, must in the long 
run augment the welfare of the whole human race. 
Thus, business enterprise, though usually based 
upon selfish motives, becomes philanthropy of a 
practical and permanent sort. 

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS. 

A man like Mr. Hanna must be judged by other 
than classical criterions. 

He could not translate a page of the Iliad or the 
Aneid ; but he is himself a most notable part of 



MARK HAN N A. 31 

that wondrous life of the twentieth century whose 
epic is yet to be written. 

He is not a Homer, but a Ulysses; not a Plu- 
tarch, but one of those types of men which Plu- 
tarch delighted to portray, in his inimitable 
"Lives." 

He is a man not of words, but of deeds; no 
speculator, in the dim, mystic fields of meta- 
physics, but a downright practical man, who sees 
the relation of coal and iron to the higher civili- 
zation. 

He knows that the foundations of civilization 
are laid in material prosperity ; that not gold, but 
granite, is the solid stuff on which our national 
temple must be builded. Your art, your learning, 
your philosophy, rest upon the earth. 

He will have no unsubstantial cloud-temple, 
shifting and floating, for his abode ; but an house 
builded with hands, resting on solid rock, and 
compact of right earthy materials. 

What is Law, to such a man as this? What 
is Government? 

Let us look closely at these things, brothers. 
Law is no system of metaphysics, for the exercise 
of sophomores. It is a most downright, prac- 
tical thing, for the settlement of disputes over 
material interests. 



32 MARK H ANN A. 

Where there is no material interest, there is no 
law, or need of law. 

Where there is no industry, no trade, there is 
no need of Government. 

A naked soul in the world has no need of Law 
or Government. Who can rob the mind? Who 
can steal a thought, a fancy? Who can restrict 
or prohibit thought? 

It is when an idea becomes embodied in a thing, 
that Law is born. That thing may be injured, 
stolen, destroyed. It may be exchanged for oth- 
er things. Then trade begins, and Government 
is born. 

Mr. Hanna represents this practical view of 
Law and Government. He is impatient of theo- 
ries, but zealous for facts. 

Ideals are well enough for poets, but will they 
work in practice? Let the poet sing of the new 
race, god-like, unselfish, loving and serving one 
another. Let him chant of the New Social 
Order which is to be, when selfishness and strife 
are dead, and no man seeks to dominate the 
thoughts or actions of another. Mr. Hanna will 
grant the beauty of the song, but he will not 
embody it in a political platform. 

He knows very well that the masses of men 
are selfish. He knows that they struggle and 



MARK HAN N A. 33 

fight like beasts for supremacy. He knows that 
they need restraint. 

He says, ''Government means the fostering and 
protection of our material interests. It means 
the regulation of manufacture and trade in a 
manner conducive to the highest material inter- 
ests of the whole nation." i 

Mr. Hanna represents material prosperity. In 
an age of unprecedented material development, 
it was inevitable that such a man, of strong nat- 
ural powers, should rise to eminence in the po- 
litical world. 

The scholar may sneer at the manufacturer, the 
merchant; but it is their day, and they can af- 
ford to let him sneer. 

A HERCULES IN POLITICS. 

--"Mr. Hanna made a success of business, and by 
applying his business talent to political work he 

has achieved a most remarkable success in poli- 
tics. 

Mr. Hanna had long been a warm friend and 
admirer of Mr. McKinley. When he started in 
to secure Mr. McKinley's nomination, he pro- 
ceeded upon business principles. He organized 
a bureau of clerks, and got himself in touch with 
the working elements of the party throughout 
the entire country. 



34 MARKHANNA. 

He spared neither strength nor money. He 
worked Hke a Hercules. He hardly took time to 
eat or sleep. He spent probably one hundred 
thousand dollars of his own good money in this 
preliminary work. 

He broke his constitution, but he also broke 
the party machine, and got McKinley before the 
people. When he went to the Convention, he 
carried McKinley's nomination in his pocket. By 
the tireless energy of one man, the elements of 
the Republican party were organized into a solid 
legion, whose banners bore the image of McKin- 
ley. / 

This Hercules of politics, whose labors were 
not twelve, but a thousand and a thousand thou- 
sand, has shown the people of the United States 
that a political machine may be constructed for a 
good man as well as for a bad one; that money 
may be poured out in unstinted measure for the 
welfare and prosperity of the whole people, as 
well as for the enrichment of a set of mere politi- 
cal spoilsmen ; that generalship and command may 
be exercised for universal as well as for individ- 
ual ends ; and that politics and patriotism are not 
yet hopelessly severed in American public life. 

In all his political work Mr. Hanna has been 
his characteristic self. Most politicians are dip- 



MARK HAN N A. 35 

lomats. They feel the public pulse, they look at 
the public tongue, they prescribe according to the 
symptoms, and thus hope to gain credit as skilled 
doctors of the law. 

^ Mr. Hanna alarmed his political friends, and 
brought consternation into many a political camp, 
by his bluntness and outspoken frankness. He 
called things by their right names He blurted 
out his honest opinions. He offended some, and 
frightened others, who were not accustomed to 
such plain speech and manners. 

But when Mr. Hanna makes a promise, he 
keeps it. If he says 'Til do what I can for 
you," he means it. When other politicians say 
this, it usually means a polite dismissal of the 
applicant's claims./ 

HANNA HAS NO HORNS. 

Mr. Hanna very well knows that he is mis- 
understood by many people, and that there is 
great prejudice against him among certain classes. 
He has done what he could to remove this mis- 
understanding and prejudice, and has achieved 
a notable measure of success, especially in some 
sections where he has made political speeches. 

At first, his political associates tried to keep him 
from going before the people. They were fearful 



Z6 MARK H ANN A. 

for the results to the party. They knew his blunt 
honesty and frankness. They knew that his very 
figure was odious to many of the people. 

But Mr. Hanna went. In fact, he went, he 
spoke, he conquered. 

He said to his friends : "Something is due to 
me! I'll go, and let them see that I haven't goc 
horns !" 

Harper's Weekly, Oct. 20, 1900, says of Mr. 
Hanna: "Chairman Hanna is about to start on 
an extended tour of South Dakota and Nebraska. 
One reason that Mr. Hanna's campaign speeches 
have been potent in the campaign is that his 
audiences find, generally to their surprise, that 
he is not a monster in appearance, and does not 
wear dollar marks all over his clothes." 

HANNA AS AN ORATOR. 

As an orator, Mr. Hanna was, to use the ex- 
pression of a Cleveland banker, "a surprise party." 

They had known him as a keen, clear-headed 
business man, terse of speech, quick of decision, 
vigorous and aggressive in all his dealings. 

They had not realized that there was in him a 
strain of Irish eloquence, inherited from no one 
knows what rebellious agitator of the Emerald 
Isle ; for Hanna's ancestry, like McKinley's, was 



MARKHANNA. 37 

of Scotch and Irish blood, and dwelt amid the 
green hills of County Antrim, from which have 
come to America's shores so many elements of 
strong- and noble character. 

His eloquence is not of the schools. It lacks 
the artificial graces of a studied style and prac- 
ticed gesture. But it has the force and vigor of a 
manly character behind it ; a directness like that 
of Antony, persuasive by its very honesty, com- 
pelling assent by virtue of that mystic force which 
we call personal magnetism. It has wit and a 
homely wisdom in it ; the wisdom of a large ex- 
perience in the matters of which he speaks. 

If he knows little about a particular subject, 
he is as mute as the Egyptian sphinx. Dynamite 
would not blast an opinion out of him. But what 
he knows, of that he will speak. 

He is not satisfied to know a little about a 
subject. He must dig under it, look over it, sur- 
round it and take it captive, before he will ven- 
ture to discuss it. 

This is the same quality that made him succeed 
in business as a young man. When he went into 
the grocery store of Hanna, Garrettson & Co., in 
the early days of Cleveland, he made up his mind 
to know all about groceries. He built up a large 
trade with the vessels plying between the Lake 



SS MARKHANNA. 

Superior mines and the port of Cleveland, and 
soon became a partner in the firm. 

Those who have met Mr. Hanna in business or 
political councils feel and acknowledge a power 
in him to sway the minds of other men, which is 
quite beyond the influence of mere words. When 
he feels that he is right, you might as well 
pepper the rock of Gibraltar with pebbles as as- 
sail him with arguments of mere expediency. 

He will not retreat, he will not compromise. 
He stands like Fate, proof against all prayers 
and tears. 

This adamantine character has won him many 
a victory. Men weary of battering against that 
wall of rock. 

And yet, having gained a victory, he is generous 
toward his conquered enemy. His head is hard, 
but his heart is tender. 

He can strike with mailed hand, and strong 
men hesitate to invite his blow ; but he can also 
caress like a child. 

THE MAN OF FLESH. 

He is by nature sunny and genial, fond of a 
joke, grasping your hand with a strong, mag- 
netic clasp ; but the rheumatic pains of old age, 
and the carking cares and myriad trials of his 



MARK HANNA. 39 

political work have made him a bit irritable, 
and those who know him best respect his moods 
the most. 

It is a bold man who, without the sanction of 
a worthy cause, will venture to beard this lion 
in his den. Intrude upon him with vain and 
frivolous questions, seek to pry into affairs which 
he prefers to keep secret, annoy him with re- 
quests for an interview, and you may hear the 

lion's growl. 

Wary reporters have learned to question him 
by telephone, a method which is conducive to 
personal safety at least, if not to lengthy inter- 
views. Very often the reportorial fancy must 
patch out the information which the reportorial 
nerve was not sufficient to obtain in full by 
personal attack. 

And yet, Mr. Hanna is no ogre, sitting in his 
cave and glaring at all intruders. He is often jo- 
vial, even boisterous in his mirth. 

He has the solid, fleshly body which denotes 
the man of the world. He does not dine on 
dewdrops, nor sup on ambrosial airs. 

He has plenty of good clay in his makeup. He 
is in his place among the brick and stone struc- 
tures of the modern city. His rugged nature 
likes the atmosphere of the busy street better 
than that of the scholar's study. He is here not 



40 MARKHANNA. 

to write or say pretty things, but to seize upon ele- 
ments such as iron, coal, copper, wood, stone, 
and out of them construct things of use in this 
material world. 

He belongs to this reptilian age of material de- 
velopment. He represents it, in the world of law 
and politics. 

The historian of the future will look back upon 
the men of this age with wonder and amaze- 
ment. They will be to him as the mammoth, the 
megatherium, the plesiosaurus are to us. 

These colossal figures which dominate the ma- 
terial activities of this age, — these Carnegies, 
Rockefellers, Morgans, Hannas, who crush their 
enormous way through our industrial forests, 
treading down all that opposes them, — are mak- 
ing paths through the erstwhile impassable jun- 
gles, which shall become the highways of the 
world ; and all men shall walk in them, and thank 
these mammoth pioneers, who cleared the way 
for liberty and prosperity. 

It is not surprising that Mr. Hanna should 
have been drawn to political work. He is of 
the earth, earthy, in the best and truest sense. 
He is no dreamer of dreams, but a worker in 
downright material elements. He is not here to 
sing of the world to come, but to do his share of 
drudgery in the world that is. 



MARK HAN N A. 41 

This throbbing earth, with its puffing engines, 
its smoking factories, its humming wheels, its 
rushing trains and steamships, its singing wires, 
vibrating with thought, its mines of treasure, its 
reservoirs of oil, its broad fields heavy with pro- 
duce ; this is his native home. He is no exile here, 
from some ideal star-world, biding his painful 
time, and assuaging the pain of life by the sing- 
ing of psalms and the muttering of pious phrases. 

To him, this world is not a vale of tears, to Be 
got through with sighing and groaning, hoping 
for a heaven beyond. It is a divine world, made 
for man to dwell in, furnished with the raw ma- 
terials for all that the body and soul may need. 

To convert these raw materials into things of 
use and beauty ; to tame wild nature, and harness 
her elements; to build homes and fill them with 
all that can make the life of man more comfort- 
able and happy ; this is to him the proper aim and 
work of man. 

To further this work is the true object and 
aim of law and politics. Mr. Hanna is not inter- 
ested in passing resolutions of respect for dim 
ideals. To build up commerce, to open chan- 
nels of exchange, to encourage manufacture, to 
regulate the social machinery in the common in- 
terest, — this is his conception of the work of poli- 
tics. 



42 MARK H ANN A. 

This fleshly man, this denizen of the material 
world, is fitted for the work which he has under- 
taken. He is a natural leader and commander 
of men. He gathers them around him as the 
mother-hen gathers her chicks. 

In his Washington home, in the historic old 
Cameron house, he is surrounded by senators and 
congressmen and other public characters. His 
forenoons are spent in meeting men. He sees 
more people than any man in Washington except 
the President. 

His friends have tried to dissuade him from 
spending his energies in this wholesale social 
intercourse. But he was made for the public. 
He would droop and die in a solitary existence. 
He must meet and mingle with men. He must 
clasp hands with them, he must speak with them 
face to face, eye looking into eye. 

He cannot deal with them by literary or other 
long-distance methods. He must feel the throb 
of their pulse, hear the sound of their voice. He 
is a human sun, radiating warmth and light ; 
and it is necessary that there should be a plane- 
tary system revolving: about him. 

This is the sort of man that nature sends to 
lead and inspire the multitude. In him they see 
themselves, and feel their power. They follow 



MARK HAN N A. 43 

and obey, because their aims and interests are 
embodied in him, their leader. 

PRACTICE VERSUS THEORY. 

Mr. Hanna is a statesman, but not a philoso- 
pher. He does not weave speculative systems. 
Theories of government are to him air, vapor, 
smoke. He is concrete and practical. Fine 
declarations of ideal truths are to him but so many 
empty words, until their practical application has 
been proven by experience. 

The freedom of Cuba, for instance, — what does 
it mean? It means freedom for the Cubans to 
do as they please, so long as they please to do 
what is right. But we must have some guaran- 
tee of their intentions. We have capital invested 
there. We have tobacco plantations, sugar mills 
and other interests. These belong to us, to men of 
the United States ; not to the Cubans. How do 
they propose to treat these possessions of ours? 

It is evident that Cuba is not wholly for the 
Cubans. Some of its most important interests, — 
without which it would be a mere island, and no 
nation, — belong to citizens of the United States. 
Who shall govern these business interests, if 
not the men who own them ? 

The sentimentalist may cry out, and raise the 



/■ 



44 MARK H ANN A. 

shout of ''imperialism ;" but facts are facts, and 
they are ever stubborn things. 

This is the practical business man's view of all 
these problems, and Mr. Hanna seems to repre- 
sent this view in national politics. It is not neces- 
sarily a base and sordid view. It is not neces- 
sarily inconsistent with sentiment, certainly not 
incompatible with justice to all concerned. 

What is a nation ? Is it land, merely ? So 
many square miles of dirt? 

• Is it not rather the wealth that has been created 
there upon that land? 

If the land is the nation, then the red men 
were the rightful rulers of America. But could 
they rule our railroads, telegraphs, factories, 
mines, and other forms of created and developed 
wealth ? 

They who produce and own must therefore con- 
trol and govern. 

To understand this truth fully, in all its mani- 
fold applications to political problems, is to un- 
derstand men like Mr. Hanna, who represent the 
so-called commercial idea in politics. 

If the application of this principle, either in 
the United States or our insular possessions, shall 
seem to conflict with our traditional theories of 
government, then it is plain that these theories 
must be modified or abandoned. 



MARK HAN N A. 45 

But does it in truth conflict? Government by 
the consent of the governed means that our busi- 
ness men in Cuba and elsewhere shall not be taxed 
or otherwise controlled by a government which 
does not recognize their rights, or admit them 
to a due share of influence in the national councils. 

It is a very simple proposition, though much 
beclouded by irrelevant discussion. When it 
comes to legislation affecting property, the own- 
ers of that property should have a voice com- 
mensurate with their interests. Here, the vote 
of the pauper should not weigh as much as that 
of the wealthy capitalist. If by our theory of 
government it is made to weigh as much, then 
property must defend its interests as best it can. 

We talk of bribery and corruption in our poli- 
tics. It sometimes happens that the capitalist is 
guilty of bribery for the same reason that the 
small boy is often guilty of lying ; namely, for rea- 
sons of self-defense. 

MOSES SMOTE THE ROCK. 

In his position as chairman of the National 
Republican Committee, Mr. Hanna performed a 
work of inestimable value to the business inter- 
ests of the country. For his purpose all possible 
means were placed at his disposal. When this 



46 MARK H ANN A. 

Moses smote the rock of corporate wealth, a plen- 
tiful stream gushed forth. No man had ever 
such power to raise money for political purposes. 
"He could walk down Wall street any day and 
raise a million dollars," says one who knows of 
what he speaks. 

What was the secret of his magnetic power, 
which could draw such treasure from its hidden 
vaults? A part of the secret lay in the char- 
acter of the man. He had been for many years 
known to the business interests of the country 
as an able and honorable leader in the business 
world. It was known that he had himself con- 
tributed very heavily to the work of nominat- 
ing McKinley. He was recognized as a com- 
petent leader, who understood the business situa- 
tion, and who could be trusted to do everything 
that was for the best. 

The rest of the secret lay in the issues which 
were at stake. 

The Goddess of Liberty was in danger from the 
quacks. She was a healthy goddess, her veins 
pulsing with good red blood. But there were 
those who declared that she was very ill. They 
said she was suffering from anaemia, or lack of 
blood. 

How did they propose to reinforce this alleged 
paucity of vital fluid? 



MARK HAN N A. 47 

They proposed to inject water into her veins. 

In solemn council, with Doctor Bryan as chief 
consulting physician, these wise doctors of the 
law proposed to inflate the arteries of the god- 
dess with a fluid which, though it is a constit- 
uent part of vital blood, must not exceed a safe 
proportion, or it becomes poisonous and fatal. 

The life of the goddess was in danger. Loyal 
men raUied to her defense. It was a question 
of life and death. 

Mr. Hanna undertook the case. The efficient 
way in which he treated it made him famous as a 
political physician. He proved his right to the 
title of Doctor of Laws, which has been bestowed 
upon him by Kenyon College. He saved the life 
of the Goddess of Liberty. 

"How We Elected *Mr. McKinley ; by the Lieu- 
tenant General of the Republican Forces." 

How a book with this title would sell, if Mr. 
Hanna would only write it! 

Think of the tons of printed matter sent out 
from headquarters ! 

"We have 4,000 newspapers in line that print 
our stuff, when we start the machine," said Mr. 
Hanna one day in a conversation. 

Think of that, ye editorial scribblers! One 
paper only prints yotir "stuff," and you never 
cease to sing of the "Power of the Press." 



48 MARKHANNA. 

Four thousand advocates, each with a myriad 
of metal tongues, shouting from the housetops ! 
Four thousand apostles, with miraculous powers, 
speaking in all known and unknown tongues, each 
one heard in a thousand or a hundred thousand or 
half a million homes at once ! 

Is it a wonder that the people heard, and were 
convinced ? 

And think of the army of orators that invaded 
the cities, the villages, the country cross-roads ; 
all thundering their warning into the people's 
ear! 

Is it a wonder that this Gospel of Prosperity, 
so published and so preached, should have num- 
bered its converts by the million? 

Aside from the merits of the Gospel, a move- 
ment planned and executed on such a colossal 
scale could not but succeed. 

"Providence is on the side of the largest bat- 
talions," said Napoleon. 

In politics, success is apt to be on the side 
of the heaviest contributors for campaign ex- 
penses. 

AS CAMPAIGN MANAGER. 

But few people realize the enormous amount 
of work involved in managing a presidential 
campaign. Mr. Hanna is admitted to be the 



MARK HANNA. 



49 



most remarkable chairman the National Com- 
mittee has ever had. He is no boss, ruling by 
virtue of his power over so many legions of obe- 
dient slaves. He is a natural leader, whose influ- 
ence with his co-workers is that of experience, 
intelligence, intuition, energy. He has the con- 
fidence of the party leaders to a most remarkable 
degree. 

There is something Napoleonic in this mastery 
of his. Men who have been leaders for the past 
thirty or forty years defer to this new arrival 
upon the field of politics. When the young Na- 
poleon was sent to command the Army of Italy, 
officers whose heads had turned gray in the serv- 
ice of France looked with suspicion and envy upon 
this little corporal who had been placed over 
them. But the little corporal soon demonstrated 
that his position could be maintained by native 
power, aside from official appointment. 

Mr. Hanna doubtless met with some opposi- 
tion at first; but it was not long before he was 
recognized on all sides as the natural leader of 
the Republican forces. His power of organiza- 
tion, cultivated through many years of strenuous 
business experience, his exact and calculated 
methods, his almost reckless expenditure of 
money, his quickness of perception and action 
in emergencies, his policy of concentration upon 



50 MARK HAN N A. 

doubtful points, all remind us of the great 
French general. 

CAMPAIGN AMMUNITION. 

This Napoleon of American politics has ruled 
and swayed far greater interests than Bona- 
parte in the height of his career. But his wea- 
pons are the instruments of peace. His armies, 
beside which Napoleon's legions were but a cor- 
poral's guard, are armed with torches, pamphlets, 
newspapers. His most deadly missiles are words 
of eloquence, shot from the lips of thousands 
of orators, or bullets of speech fired from the 
myriad batteries of the press. 

During the campaign of '96, millions of docu- 
ments, ranging from the small leaflet to the 
''Campaign Text-book," a well-bound volume of 
456 pages, were distributed throughout the length 
and breadth of the land. Thousands of articles, 
in the form of printed slips, or put into plates 
ready for the press, were distributed to newspa- 
pers all over the United States. The cost of all 
this literary ammunition mounts into the hun- 
dreds of thousands of dollars. 

FOREIGN TONGUES IN AMERICAN 

POLITICS. 

Mr. Hanna's legions are of all nationalities, like 



MARK H ANN A. 51 

those of the Roman armies. But for the services 
of competent interpreters, Mr. Hanna would need 
the apostohc gift of tongues in order to deal with 
them. One folder issued in vast numbers during 
the campaign was printed in twelve different lan- 
guages : English, German, Italian, French, Nor- 
wegian, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Bo- 
hemian, — even Hebrew and modern Greek ! Mr. 
McKinley's speech of acceptance was printed in 
several languages, and a portion of it in Greek. 

When I saw the Greek text of the latter, I 
could scarcely believe my eyes. The language of 
Homer, Demosthenes, Pericles, — modified, to be 
sure, by the lapse of centuries, but still the old 
classic language of Greece, — here in this new 
western world,^ its accents used to promulgate 
the gospel of the Republican party of the United 
States ! Verily, times change, — and we change 
with them. It wrenched the idiom a bit, and Mc- 
Kinley, in Greek type, had an unfamiliar aspect; 
but there it was, in the letters made familiar to 
every schoolboy by Xenophon and Homer. 

From an article by Luther B. Little in Mun- 
sey's Magazine for September, 1900, the follow- 
ing is quoted, as giving some interesting details 
concerning the work of a great national cam- 
paign : 

''Presidential campaigns in the LTnited States 



52 MARK HAN N A. 

are conducted on a tremendous scale. It is said 
that four years ago the RepubHcans alone spent 
thirteen millions of dollars in a little more than 
four months. 

No department of this vast machinery receives 
more attention from the managers of the two 
great parties than the "literary bureau." While 
it continues^ it is the greatest publishing business 
in the world. 

Thousands of men are kept busy in writing 
and distributing campaign literature, which is sent 
forth in hundreds of millions of pieces to all parts 
of the United States. Moreover, carloads of doc- 
uments inserted in the official record of Congress 
purely for campaign purposes at the direction of 
leaders of both parties, are printed and distributed 
at the expense of the government. 

The average person, to whom campaign docu- 
ments are almost as familiar as newspapers, 
knows nothing of the machinery which produces 
them. It is one of the most remarkable chapters 
in the modern complexity of politics. 

Hundreds of millions of pieces of printed 
matter in the form of campaign literature are 
sent to the voters of this country in a Presiden- 
tial year. Like the seed in the parable of the 
sower, they fall on all sorts of ground. Some 
fall by the wayside and are sold as old junk after 



MARKHANNA. 53 

the campaign is over. Some fall among the thorns 
in the camps of the enemy, and a hostile political 
committee springs up and chokes them. Some 
fall into the stony ground, where there is no or- 
ganization to distribute them properly, and they 
wither away to become wrapping paper during the 
next four years. But some fall into good ground 
and bear fruit, if not a hundred fold, at least 
enough to warrant all the labor and expense of 
the sowers who scatter them broadcast. 
>''''The average man takes some stock in what he 
sees in print. This inherited tendency hes behind 
the whole idea of sending out campaign litera- 
ture. It Is designed by the party managers to 
instruct the ignorant, to convince the wavering, 
to awaken those who lack interest, to arouse to 
greater zeal those who are already at work. 

The stump orator, the brass band, the waving 
banners, the cheers, the personal canvass, must 
be supplemented by something which reaches the 
individual and is convincing. Ask the average 
man for his authority for any one of the state- 
ments he makes on the way down town. He will 
answer, 'T read it in the paper." 

He read it. He believes it. The value of the 
campaign document is explained. Here is re- 
vealed why expert political managers spend so 



54 MARK HANNA. 

many thousands of dollars on the output of the 
printing presses.^- 

EARLY CAMPAIGN LITERATURE. 

In the early days some of the campaign litera- 
ture was as dignified, as stately, and as substantial 
as the founders of the republic themselves. Some 
of their contributions have come down as classics 
in the form of 'The Madison Papers ;" and The 
Federalist still illumines the history of the early 
days of the republic. 

A half century ago the speeches of Webster, 
Clay, Choate, Calhoun, and their contemporaries 
were read and cherished by the comparatively few 
citizens who were so fortunate as to be on the 
mailing list. But it has been since that time that 
the preparation, publication, and distribution of 
campaign literature has become systematized as 
one of the arts of the political managers. And 
this is logical and natural under the changed con- 
ditions. 

A great increase in this feature of campaign 
work has come about since 1880, when it began 
to assume wholesale proportions. Printing 
presses had become more numerous ; white paper 
was cheaper. The foreign element in the popu- 
lation had increased rapidly, and must needs be 
educated on the political issues in its own Ian- 



MARK H ANN A. 55 

guage. Moreover, the reconstruction period had 
passed. New issues which the Civil War had 
crowded to the rear were to divide the two great 
parties, and a new generation must be instructed 
in the intricacies of the tariff, the questions of la- 
bor and capital^ and the financial problems which 
had been battled over for three quarters of a cen- 
tury, and which were presented in an acute form, 
involving the free coinage of silver at the rate 
of sixteen to one^ in 1896. 

The war sentiment which had made it so easy 
to elect and reelect Grant in 1868 and 1872 was 
glowing less faintly as the struggle receded into 
history, and the close vote in 1876 gave a jar 
to the Republicans which was something new in 
the history of the party. It dawned on certain 
leaders that they could no longer count on 'more 
victories in the bloody shirt.' The Democrats 
had been inspired to hope for success by their 
nearness of access to power in the Tilden cam- 
paign. It may have been these facts that awoke 
the parties to the need of new methods. 

A VAST FLOOD OF DOCUMENTS. 

Campaign literature took on a fresh impor- 
tance as an element of the work in 1880, and the 
making and distributing of it assumed huge pro- 
portions. It has been increased, so far as infor- 



56 MARKHANNA. 

mation is to be had, ever since. Both parties 
have devoted energy, brains, and money to it. 
and in notable instances the quantities of docu- 
ments, pamphlets, large books; and leaflets is- 
sued and scattered throughout the country have 
been stupendous when taken in the aggregate. 

On the authority of one who helped send it; 
out in the campaign of 1896, the Republicans dis- 
tributed from the national committee headquar- 
ters, in round numbers, three hundred million 
pieces. It has been estimated that these docu- 
ments weighed, all told, two thousand tons. 
Printing presses, clerks, express companies, and 
the post offices of New York and Chicago were 
brought into use in the first handling of this 
mass of printed matter. From Chicago two hun- 
dred million pieces were sent out ; from New York 
one hundred million — four pieces for every man, 
woman, and child in the United States. 

HOW IT IS PREPARED. 

No "copy" in any printing office, unless it be 
the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where 
government bonds and currency are printed, is 
scrutinized more closely or edited with greater 
care than copy intended for campaign literature. 
Expert and experienced political managers give 
their close attention to this detail. Men who are 



MARKHANNA. 57 

learned as regards the issues at stake, and who 
have that requisite of the successful politician 
which might be termed a knowledge of applied 
psychology, hold the blue pencil. Paragraphs, 
sentences, and words are weighed with reference 
to their effect on the mind of the reader. What 
will be of advantage in one part of the country 
may be useless or positively harmful in other 
parts. Documents which will appeal strongly to 
voters of one nationality will be meaningless to 
those of another. Facts which will appeal to bus- 
iness men in a metropolis are often like red rags 
before a bull if thrust before the eye of the prairie 
farmer, and all these elements are taken into the 
account. 

The care with which special campaign docu- 
ments are edited and prepared is a tacit acknowl- 
edsfment of the intellisfence of the voters for whom 
they are intended. Every statement is likely to 
be read and weighed and discussed in the village 
post office, the country store, the family circle, 
the clubs, saloons, and other loafing places of the 
cities. Moreover, campaign documents issued by 
either party are destined to be closely scrutinized 
by the enemy. The keenest brains of the other 
party will read and study them, and statements 
which may be twisted or distorted, sentences 



58 MARKHANNA. 

which contain injudicious references, will be ta- 
ken up and turned into boomerangs." 

HIS CLEVELAND BUSINESS RELA- 
TIONS. 

Mr. Hanna has been in business in Cleveland 
for forty years, and during all that time he has 
kept the esteem and respect of his business asso- 
ciates. If he has loomed up like a Colossus 
in the political world during the last few years, 
we must remember that he stands upon a large 
pedestal of business success. This pedestal has 
been builded by many years of earnest, strenuous 
life. 

Cleveland's business men are proud of Mr. 
Hanna. It is needless to say that Mr. Hanna is 
proud of them and of the city which they have 
helped to build. In a speech before the Cham- 
ber of Commerce, on the evening of May 13th, 
'97, Mr. Hanna said: 

"I see before me the men whose brain and tal- 
ent and industry have made the city what it is. 
And in mentioning them I will not forget the 
thousands of builders — the working classes of our 
city; to them, as much as to ourselves, is due 
our greatness. 

"My recollections go back to the beginning of 
my business career — to 1857. It was an impor- 



MARK H ANN A. 59 

tant year in business circles in Cleveland, a very 
important year^ and, I might say, a good year for 
a young man to cut his eye teeth in. 

"Coming to Cleveland to make it my home in 
1852, I found here a beautiful city, of about thir- 
ty thousand inhabitants, known as the 'Forest 
City,' called so, I presume, because there were 
more native forest trees than there were houses ; 
and you didn't have to go very far from this hotel 
(The Hollenden) to get into the forest. 

"I have watched and studied the growth of 
Cleveland from a business standpoint all these 
years, and I am proud to be able to stand before 
this audience tonight and say that no city has 
the right to be more proud of its record and the 
men that made it than the city of Cleveland. 
Then, almost the only industry that might be so 
called was shipbuilding. The old river bed was 
lined with shipyards. The music of the saw and 
axe was heard by day, and that of the frogs at 
night." 

On the occasion of the fifty-first anniversary of 
the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, held in its 
new building, on the evening of June 6th, '99, 
the President, Mr. Greenough, said,in introducing 
Mr. Hanna as one of the after-dinner speakers: 
"If there is any man here in this Chamber who 
rejoices in the prosperity of this country, and 



6c MARK H ANN A. 

believes that it is due to the policy of the Republi- 
can party of protection and honest money, he 
must remember that there is no man in this coun- 
try to whom we owe the existing condition of 
things more than we do to Mark Hanna." 

In responding Mr. Hanna said : "It makes 
me feel old when I remember that 43 years ago I 
carried my little samples to the old Board of 
Trade room in the old Exchange at the foot of 
Superior street. I did not have on a dress suit 
or a white vest, but I had on blue over-alls. That 
was my first connection with the Chamber of 
Commerce, or, as it was called then, the Board of 
Trade of the City of Cleveland. I was the young- 
est member, perhaps, and if two certain other 
men are not here tonight, I might say I am the 
oldest member. 

"I have fully appreciated what can be and what 
has been accomplished by such an amalgamation 
of capital and industry as are found in the cham- 
bers of commerce and boards of trade through- 
out the country. I do not care, in the few re- 
marks I have to make tonight, to say anything 
upon politics or the political situation. But I 
merely wish to say one word with reference 
to the campaign of 1896, in which I took a part, 
and I want to go on record among my friends 
here tonight, and in confidence tell you that no 



MARK HAN N A. 6i 

factor, no influence, no power in those results 
was felt with greater force than the united action 
of the business men of the whole country." 

MR. HANNA'S IDEA OF POLITICAL 

DUTY. 

Later in his address Mr. Hanna expressed his 
idea of what is the political duty of the busi- 
ness man ; and it is quoted here as throwing some 
light upon the motives which have led Mr. Hanna 
himself to take such an active part in the politi- 
cal affairs first, of the state of Ohio, and after- 
wards of the nation. 

"It is a misfortune," he said, "that business 
men and men of affairs do not take greater inter- 
est in public affairs ; — call it politics if you will, 
it is none the less their affair ; — and if things are 
not as they should be, if our municipal, state and 
national governments are not what they should 
be, it is our fault. 

"It is our fault because we never feel that it 
is necessary to leave our homes at night, or neg- 
lect our business by day, to spend one minute or 
one hour for our city, state or country^ only when 
a crisis comes, — and then we do it with the sud- 
den motive of self-preservation. 

"When we complain of the laws which are 
passed at our state capital, we should reflect that 



62 MARK HAN N A. 

we are responsible for the agents that we send 
there to enact those laws. 

*'If we find fault with the administration of our 
city affairs, we must remember that we stayed at 
home the night of the primaries, and took no part 
in the selection of the officers to whom we en- 
trusted our city government." 

THE BRAND OF THE BOSS. 

Continuing, Mr. Hanna said : "If a man takes 
a prominent part in public affairs, and becomes 
conspicuous because of his isolated position, 
whose fault is it? It is the fault of the men 
who will not stand shoulder to shoulder with him 
and help him do that work. 

"If a man has the ambition to do right, and 
do good by his fellow men, and is willing to neg- 
lect his business and devote his time to those in- 
terests, is it right because he is willing to lead 
and none will follow, that that isolation shall 
brand him as a boss? 

"All men are more or less selfish ; but I claim 
that a man who has the nerve and the courage 
to run the risk of being called a politician, who 
will step out and devote time and energy and 
what capabilities he is endowed with to benefit 
his fellow men in city, state or nation, is entitled 
to the support of his kind. 



MARK HANNA. 63 

"Otherwise, what follows? The men who 
want to do politics for the trade, for what there 
is in it, are immediately arrayed against him. 

"I am glad to have had the opportunity, in 
the interest of clean politics, in the interest of 
good government, to urge you and to pray with 
you from this hour to constitute yourselves a 
committee of the whole to take hold of affairs 
in this our beloved city, and stand bv and with 
the men who are for the right and for good 
government, and see to it that their hands are 
strengthened, their motives not questioned, their 
efforts approved and sustained by every honest 
man, high or low. 

"Do not condemn them, do not call them politi- 
cians, do not belittle them, do not feel that they 
are humiliated by taking a part in politics ; but ad- 
mit that they have motives as pure and as good 
as yours, that there are men who will make sacri- 
fices for the public good." 

If ever any man was maligned for the part he 
has taken in politics, Mr. Hanna is that man. Is 
it possible that he has deserved to be lampooned, 
slandered, caricatured by the artists of the Demo- 
cratic press, hounded with accusations of selfish 
motives, and otherwise libelled as he has been for 
the past five years, merely because he has put into 



64 MARKHANNA. 

practice the theory of poHtical duty announced in 
the words above-quoted? 

A CHILLING EXPERIENCE. 

If Plutarch were writing this sketch of Mr. 
Hanna he would have some tales of the supernat- 
ural to tell ; some instance of ghostly visitation, or 
of interference by the gods. If the following 
event had not been reported by the press, and 
thus recorded as a mere coincidence, it might in 
time have been narrated as an instance of super- 
natural interference in behalf of the Democratic 
party. Mr. Hanna in his campaign speeches a 
year ago had made several references to the ice 
trust, in which prominent Democrats of New 
York were interested. 

One day (Oct. 4) while he was addressing a 
large crowd in a tent at the corner of 65th and 
Halsted streets, Chicago, a huge block of ice fell 
or was thrown from a tall building nearby, and 
came crashing through the tent. It grazed Mr. 
Hanna's shoulder as it fell, and was shattered 
into fragments at his feet. If it had struck him 
on the head, it would certainly have killed him. 

How easy, in a superstitious age, for this inci- 
dent to be interpreted as a supernatural inter- 
ference ! Olympian Apollo, discarding his clang- 
ing bow and arrows for a weapon more suitable 



MARKHANNA. 65 

to the occasion, aimed this block of ice at the head 
of Achilles, leader of his people's enemies. This 
knock-down argument, though by virtue of bad 
marksmanship (unusual to Apollo, the far-dart- 
er) it did not kill his enemy, would certainly 
have killed his cause, in the minds of a Homeric 
people ! The ice trust would have received celes- 
tial sanction, and immunity from all anti-trust 
legislation forevermore. Whether the enthusi- 
asm of the meeting was chilled by this unexpected 
demonstration from above, the writer does not 
know. Very likely Mr. Hanna's ready wit turned 
it to good account. He certainly dealt in the sort 
of arguments that would "cut ice." He knew 
a few things about ice, and the trust that had 
cornered it. 

HANNA'S MILITARY RECORD. 

/Mr. Hanna is a veteran of the Civil War. 
Whether his rheumatism is the result of his hard 
drilling during the 100 days of his enlistment 
the deponent saith not. At any rate, he has not 
applied for a pension on that ground. 

As to military honors, Mr. Hanna probably got 
as many of them as the other boys in Company C 
of the 150th Ohio. He was the first lieutenant of 
the company. The regiment was mustered into 
the U. S. volunteer service on May 5, 1864, to 



66 MARK HAN N A. 

serve loo days. Companies A and H, inclusive, 
were all from Cleveland, and were made up of the 
flower of Cleveland's younger citizens. 

The regiment left home for the front on Thurs- 
day, May 1 2th, marching to the old depot to the 
inspiring music of Jack Leland's famous band, 
which was a part of the organization. 

The regiment was ordered to Washington, and 
put on garrison duty in the forts which constitut- 
ed the Capitol's chain of defenses. It remained 
there during the term of its enlistment, partici- 
pating in the fight with a part of Early's rebel 
corps, July lo and ii. 

While Mr. Hanna's service in the war did not 
offer him an opportunity for winning special 
laurels, it no doubt served to give him a deep sym- 
pathy with the sufferings and trials of those who 
fought on bloody fields for their country's exist- 
ence as a nation. 

The young lieutenant was popular with his 
comrades, and was then, even more than now, 
"a jolly good fellow." 

William J. Gleason, in a historical sketch of the 
150th Regiment, says: "The jolly, auburn- 
haired, freckle-faced youth that served as first 
lieutenant of Company C in 1864 is now univer- 
sally recognized as one of the most eminent 
men of this nation ; a tireless, brainy, unequalled 



MARKHANNA. (^y 

political leader, universally and favorably known. 
I refer to Hon. Marcus A. Hanna, successful bus- 
iness man and senator from the great state of 
Ohio." 

Senator Wolcott of Colorado was a member 
of Company D ; Gov. Nash of Ohio was in Com- 
pany K; Nathan Perry Payne was in Hanna's 
company ; Allan T. Brinsmade was in Company 
H ; Moses G. Watterson in Company F. In the 
roster of Hanna's company, emblazoned on the 
walls of the magnificent Soldiers and Sailors' 
Monument in Cleveland's Public Square, are 
names which are now among the most honored of 
the city: Alvord, Brainard, Ford, Gaylord, Hoyt, 
McMillan, Payne, and many others. 

THAT OTIS BRIBERY CASE. 

If this were a biography instead of an outline 
sketch, it would need to deal in detail with the 
charges of bribery in the Ohio legislature on the 
occasion of Mr. Hanna's election to the United 
States Senate. I forced my way through the 
tangled jungle of reports and discussions in the 
Congressional Record, Vol. 33, pp. 6585 to 6635. 
I was too much exhausted to form any rational 
conclusion. It is the old chorus of "Katy~did" 
and "Katy-didn't." 

One gets the impression that there was a vast 



68 MARK HAN N A. 

deal of fussing for partisan purposes. Why were 
these so-called patriots so anxious to convict a 
politician of using money to gain a vote? 

Politicians of both parties are constantly doing 

that. 

Let us not assume these airs of superior sanc- 
tity. We are all pots, and our bottoms are all 
sooty. If some are more so than others, that is 
no excuse for pointing at them with such a show 
of holy scorn. I fancy that the "honorable men" 
who were so zealous in denouncing this Caesar 
had designs of their own, entirely apart from the 
ends of justice. It is usually the scribes and 
Pharisees who clamor for the sinner's blood. 
When men who are without sin begin to throw 
stones, it is time enough for the public to join 
with them. 

Mr. Hanna may have been guilty, or one of his 
representatives may have been guilty; the Lord 
only knows. Nobody can tell from the evidence. 
''If there was any guilt of the sort," says one of 
Mr. Hanna's friends^ *'it was a case of fighting 
the devil with fire, and whipping him as he de- 
served. Any one who knows the treacherous 
plot that was formed against Mr, Hanna will say 
that much. There is honor even among thieves ; 
but not always among politicians ; though thieves 



MARKHANNA. 69 

and politicians sometimes have other things in 
common ; stolen goods, for instance." 

We must look broadly at these things, broth- 
ers. Whilst the masses of the people are so in- 
different, politics will be chiefly a game for spoils ; 
and such a game is always a corrupt one. Where 
so many of the political workers are rascals, a 
saint could not succeed by saintliness. A good 
man may have to be elected by questionable meth- 
ods ; but it is better to elect a good man by such 
methods than a bad one. 

I am not defending bribery and corruption. I 
am only saying that when you are in Rome, you 
may be forced to do as Romans do, however 
much you may dislike it. 

THE TRAFFIC IN VOTES. 

Mr. Hanna's name has been used by his ene- 
mies almost as a synonym for bribery and cor- 
ruption in politics. It is presumed that a man 
who has had the disposal of such immense sums 
of money would be more than human if he never 
used it for anything but paying the bills of print- 
ers and the traveling expenses of campaign speak- 
ers. 

It is a well-known fact that there are thou- 
sands of votes to be had for cash, in every great 
election contest. Doubtless one party is as good 



70 MARKHANNA. 

as the other, so far as the purchasing of votes 
is concerned. If one party can afford to buy 
more votes than the other, that does not make 
it the more guilty party. Where each is as dis- 
honest as it can afford to be, there is little choice 
on moral grounds. 

Whether the charges of dishonesty on the part 
of both our great political parties are true or 
false, just or exaggerated, the fact is that most of 
us are swayed by personal interests in our politi- 
cal affiliations. 

I know a man, and there are certainly many 
others like him, who rejoices in every election 
day as a sure source of revenue to himself. He 
openly confesses to the sale of his suffrage. He 
says, "His vote is all a poor man has these days, 
and he must make the most of it." 

Tariffs, theories of currency, are deep mysteries 
to his simple mind. He is not able to grasp the 
remote rewards which the politicians promise; 
but the price of his vote he can grasp, and put 
safely into his breeches' pocket. That is a con- 
crete benefit, indisputable, real. The others are 
remote, uncertain, and matters of dispute. He 
purposely omits to vote until late in the day ; for 
then, he says, in the closing heat of the race, the 
bidding is likely to be higher. 

But do we not, most of us, sell our votes to the 



MARK HANNA. 71 

highest bidder, or to him whose offer seems to 
our best advantage? Who votes otherwise than 
for that which promises to put the most money 
into his own pocket ? Is not this the chief cry of 
the demagogue, — "Advantage, advantage, to thee 
and thine, good voter ; do but cast thy vote for me, 
and I will put money in thy purse. Larger wages, 
more money, lower prices for what thou must buy 
and higher for what thou wilt sell, — all these, and 
more, shalt thou achieve for thyself if thou but 
vote as I bid thee." 

My neighbor raises lemons, not that his fellow 
citizens in the east may have lemonade, but that 
he himself may get dollars. When he votes, he 
votes to protect his lemons by high tariffs laid on 
fruit from the Mediterranean. Does not this 
man sell his vote as truly as the man above-men- 
tioned? He is not thinking of the general ben- 
efit to the country of a judicious protective tariff. 
He is not thinking of the larger wages he can 
afford to pay his laborers because of his larger 
profits on his lemons. He thinks of his own in- 
terests, and votes for them only. 

Another man believes that the free coinage of 
silver would somehow better his condition. If 
more money were to be made, he would somehow 
get his share of it. He does not think of the loss 
to his creditors. He has agreed to pay his neigh- 



^2 MARKHANNA. 

bor fifty gallons of good wine. He dilutes it with 
twenty-five gallons of water, and expects his 
neighbor to accept fifty gallons of this mixture in 
payment of the obligation, which will leave to the 
good man himself twenty-five gallons for the pay- 
ment of other debts. He does not think of the ef- 
fect of this sort of practice upon the wine indus- 
try, or trade in general. He thinks of his own in- 
terests, and foolishly believes that they will be 
served by this sharp practice. It is selfishness, 
and mistaken selfishness, which is always the 
worst kind. But he sells his vote to the party 
which promises him this foolish benefit, and 
mourns if his cause is defeated by wiser heads. 

Alas^ that there is little but selling of votes in 
this Republic! It is the old strife, which began 
in the jungle, for self and self interests. That we 
use ballots instead of claws or teeth or bullets 
makes the strife none the less a battle to the 
death. 

And yet, "He maketh the wrath of man to 
praise Him." Out of strife cometh forth prog- 
ress. The march of civilization goes steadily 
forward, even though its legions trample the 
dead and wounded beneath their feet. 



jk 



HIS LITERARY TASTES, 
r. Hanna is fond of the drama, but cares little 



MARK H ANN A. 73 

or nothing for poetry. Here is his nature again 
revealed. He belongs to the phenomenal world. 
So long as the poet's fancies remain in the world 
of fancy, invisible, intangible, this man of flesh 
will have none of them. Put them upon the stage, 
embody them in figures that move and speak and 
act, translate them into terms of human life, he 
will appreciate and enjoy them. He loves Shake- 
speare, who above all other men, could 

"Give to airy nothings 
A local habitation and a name." 

In fiction, he loves writers like Dickens and 
Hugo, whose magic seizes upon all the elements 
of the world and out of them constructs new 
worlds to fascinate and delight the reader. 

It is needless to say that Mr. Hanna does not 
read Kant and Schopenhaur. Their world is not 
his world. He is rock, granite, iron, copper. They 
are sun-beams, star-rays, — perhaps Mr. Hanna 
would say, moonshine !^^- 

But possibly Mr. Hanna appreciates men of the 
philosophical order quite as well as many of them 
appreciate men of his practical kind. Men of ideas 
and men of affairs are quite likely to misunder- 
stand and underestimate each other. 

The transcendentalist sees only ideas. To him 
the world is a fleeting phenomenon. It is related 



74 MARKHANNA. 

that one day when Theodore Parker and R. W. 
Emerson were walking together on a Boston 
street a Mlllerite rushed up and predicted the 
speedy ending of the world. Mr. Emerson re- 
plied calmly that he thought he might get on very 
well without it ! 

Men like Mr. Hanna cannot get on without a 
material world. They must have downright phys- 
ical elements to work in. They must delve for 
coal, oil, copper ; they must clear away forests, and 
in the place of them construct cities and railways ; 
they are hungry for things, and do not pine for 
poems and systems of speculative philosophy. 
//And yet, in a very real sense, Mr. Hanna is an 
educated man. This word education has not com- 
monly the broad meaning which it ought to have. 
It stands yet too exclusively for that culture and 
knowledge derived from books, or from oral in- 
struction. It ought to include that knowledge of 
practical affairs which comes as a result of expe- 
rience in the world of things. 

Many a so-called educated man knows little or 
nothing of the things which touch him most 
closely in his every-day life. He knows about the 
chariots of the Greeks and Romans, but cannot 
harness a horse to a modern buggy ./He knows the 
chemistry of foods, but cannot raise a hill of corn 
or potatoes. He can talk learnedly of the dwell- 



MARKHANNA. 75 

ings of primitive man, and has at his tongue's 
end the various styles of architecture developed 
in the world ; but he does not know how his own 
house is built ; how bricks and shingles are made ; 
how lumber is sawn and dressed. 

He can tell you of the mural paintings of Pom- 
peii, and the hieroglyphs of Egyptian tombs and 
pyramids ; but he cannot mix a pot of paint for his 
own door posts, nor glaze a sash in his own win- 
dow. He is versed in the costumes of the an- 
cients, and knows the construction of the sandal, 
the chiton, the tunic, the toga ; but he cannot cob- 
ble his own shoes, nor mend a rent in his own 
trousers. 

He knows of the tools and weapons of the As- 
syrians and Babylonians, the Greeks and Ro- 
mans, the Egyptians and Hindoos ; but he cuts his 
fingers with his own jacknife, and digs his foot 
with his own garden hoe; and as for the mys- 
teries of the bit and augur, the jack plane and 
hand saw, he wots not of them ; he has not proved 
them, 
^-^he inefficiency and ignorance of the "edu- 
cated" man, in the domain of common things, has 
long served to point a joke and adorn a paragraph. 
And yet, his knowledge of books gains him the 
reverence and respect of the laboring man, whose 
attainments and skill in practical things the schol- 



"](> MARK HAN N A. 

ar too often disregards. It is time that this over- 
exaltation of "book-learning" should cease, and 
the attainments of the laborer and artisan and 
business manager be included in the term educa- 
tion. It is time that the young mechanic should 
mitigate his envy of the student, and perceive 
that he himself may be an educated man, through 
strict attention to his tasks. ' 

/ 

MR. HANNA AND THE COLLEGE MAN. 

Mr. Hanna attended the exercises on the occa- 
sion of the seventy-fifth anniversary at East 
Cleveland. The exercises were held in a huge 
tent on the campus. The Professors and the 
several classes had filed solemnly in, and taken 
their seats ; the seniors, in caps and gowns, mov- 
ing with becoming dignity. The platform was 
filled with notables. It was an impressive scene. 

There was a slight commotion at one end of the 
platform. A large, broad-faced, genial-looking 
man was seen making his w^ay to a chair reserved 
for him. He walked with a cane, and limped per- 
ceptibly.. 

"There's Mark Hanna!" was the whisper that 
went round; and many eyes were turned upon 
him. He took his seat, with a ponderous but quiet 
dignity, and wiped his face with his handkerchief. 



MARKHANNA. yj 

It was a warm day, and the tent was packed like 
a political convention. 

The exercises proceeded. A choir of young 
men rendered several fine selections ; one of them 
being the ''Pilgerchor," from Wagner's Tann- 
hauser. Dr. Josiah Strong, of New York, gave 
the address of the day. It was a broad, compre- 
hensive treatment of the industrial situation. 

Mr. Hanna was listening. If it had been a dis- 
course on Dr. Schliemann's excavations at the site 
of ancient Troy, he might have been bored. He 
is not interested in antiquities. Men of his stamp 
are interested in the excavation of coal and iron. 

The address was long, and, as I have said, the 
day was very warm. But Mr. Hanna listened, 
with perhaps more interest than many of the au- 
dience. Here was a man who was showing some 
appreciation of the sort of work Mr. Hanna and 
his class have done and are still doing, in building 
the foundations of our wonderful civilization. 
There was occasional applause, in which Mr. 
Hanna joined. As Dr. Strong concluded, with a 
fine peroration, even Jupiter applauded, with sev- 
eral peals of thunder. 

There were some concluding formalities, in 
which Mr. Hanna did not seem to be so much in- 
terested. The seniors received their diplomas, 
with becoming modesty and blushes. Mr. Hanna 



78 MARKHANNA. 

was getting a bit weary, and shifted restlessly in 
his chair. Diplomas do not mean very much to 
him. They do not mean very much to the gradu- 
ate himself, after he has been out of college for 
twenty years or so. 

"The mice nibbled holes in mine, several years 
ago," whispered a business man at my side, who 
had been one of my college chums twenty years 
ago. 

The assembly was dismissed. Mr. Hanna was 
lost in the crowd. But he appeared again, some 
time afterward, in the huge tent where the ban- 
quet was to be held. 

Long tables groaned with eatables. There was 
a buzz and roar of conversation from over a thou- 
sand alumni ; there were greetings and handshak- 
ings, reminiscences and laughter. 

When all the good things had disappeared down 
throats that seemed to have recovered their 
former capacity for both swallowing and yelling, 
the President, Mr. Thwing, began to introduce 
the speakers of the day. When he came to Mr. 
Hanna, every ear was alert. 

I have referred, in the opening of this sketch, 
to President Thwing's remarks. Mr. Hanna's 
words may be of interest to the reader. 

*Tt was with great reluctance," he said, after 
the vociferous greeting had subsided, "that I was 



MARKHANNA. 79 

prevailed upon to come out here and make a 
speech before all you college men. Your Presi- 
dent's introduction has placed me under great em- 
barrassment. It has added to the humidity of the 
atmosphere," continued Mr. Hanna, wiping the 
trickling perspiration from his broad face. 

>>'Yes, I was once a student in this institution. 
The question came up, in our family councils, 
whether I should go to work, or go to college. 
I wanted to go to work. My mother said I should 
go to college. So I went. I was taking a course 
in science. There were three of us in the class. 
The other two left, and then I was alone. 

"I was young, innocent, confiding. One day 
some of the sophomores induced me to help dis- 
tribute copies of a burlesque program of the exer- 
cises of the junior class. I stood on the steps, 
handing them to the audience as they passed in. 
The President of the college came along. He 
grasped me by the shoulder and asked, 'Young 
man, what are you doing?' I replied that I was 
distributing literature, in the interests of educa- 
tion and morality. 

'T quit college soon after that. The faculty 
seemed to be resigned to my absence. One day 
the President met me on the street. I had on blue 
overalls, and was hard at work. He looked at 
me with an expression which seemed to say, Well, 



8o MARKHANNA. 

I guess you have found your right place ! And I 
thought so, too. I hked work better than study. 
I have been hard at work ever since. Boys, don't 
be ashamed of work or overalls."/ 

It has been several years since Mr. Hanna has 
worn overalls, but he has kept steadily at work. 
He has probably never missed the diploma which 
he failed to get. But he now wears the title Doc- 
tor of Laws, bestowed upon him by Kenyon Col- 
lege. His friends think he need not be ashamed 
of it. They say that he has earned it. But, after 
all^ it is only a ribbon on the lion's neck. 

CLEVELAND ITEMS. 

While Mr. Hanna is a patriotic American with 
the welfare of the whole country at heart, he is 
most loyal to the City of Cleveland and its inter- 
ests. He has a charming home on the West Side, 
in a section which in many respects is the most de- 
sirable of any in Cleveland for residence purposes. 
Mr. Hanna was a pioneer in opening up this sec- 
tion, and has been active in promoting general im- 
provements. Here he spends that portion of the 
year not occupied with his duties as Senator at 
Washington. 

Mr. Hanna's business interests all center in 
Cleveland. He is president of the Union National 
Bank, president of the Cleveland City Railway 



MARKHANNA. 8i 

Company, operating eighty-five miles of track ; is 
prominently identified with the lake-carrying 
trade, owning many vessels, one of which bears 
his name; is connected with large coal and iron 
interests and various other enterprises ; and is re- 
puted to be worth in the aggregate several mil- 
lions of dollars. 

Mr. Hanna has just cause to be proud of Cleve- 
land and her industries. Cleveland is the largest 
city in Ohio, and the seventh in size in the United 
States. She has 46 banks, not including those or- 
ganized under the building laws, of which there 
are 27. More than 150 railroad trains daily are 
required, besides the vessels, to handle her enor- 
m.ous traffic. She is well provided with schools 
and churches, and is the home of Western Reserve 
University and the Case School of Applied Sci- 
ence. Her iron and steel industries give employ- 
ment to thousands of laborers. She has the largest 
carbon works in the world, the largest salt works, 
largest chewing gum factory, largest malleable 
iron works in the United States, the largest ar- 
cade building, and the finest soldiers' monument 
west of New York, costing $300,000. 

She has the greatest political manager in the 
world, but Mr. Hanna does not mention that. 

Cleveland has over 90 million dollars invested 



82 MARKHANNA. 

in manufactures, and her annual output is about 
125 millions. 

She has magnificent parks and boulevards, and 
her Euclid avenue has long been famous as the 
finest street in America. 

One of Cleveland's most notable structures is 
the viaduct connecting the east and west sections 
of the city. It was completed in 1878, and cost 
$1,600,000. 

The Garfield Memorial is a handsome monu- 
ment to the memory of our martyred President, 
on a commanding site in East Cleveland, not far 
from the buildings of Western Reserve Uni- 
versity. 

The greatest telescope in the world, the Yerkes, 
belonging to the University of Chicago, was con- 
structed in Cleveland, only the glass for the lenses 
coming from abroad. It cost over half a million 
dollars. 

Cleveland is the largest iron ore market in the 
world. The enormous iron ore industry of Lake 
Superior, and its distribution to the world, center 
in Cleveland. It represents .an investment of 
nearly 200 millions of dollars. Next to Clyde, 
England, Cleveland is the largest shipbuilding 
center in the world. The tonnage entering the 
port has in a single year equalled that of Liver- 
pool. If the recent experiment of an ocean-going 



MARKHANNA. 83 

line of steamers from Chicago shall prove success- 
ful, there is no saying what greatness Cleveland 
may develop in shipping. 

MR. HANNA'S SHIPPING INTERESTS. 

When Mr. Hanna became interested in the ves- 
sel business on the Great Lakes, thirty years ago, 
that business was in its infancy. The largest ves- 
sel in the ore trade at that time carried only 600 
tons. Now there are steel steamers plying be- 
tween the mines of Lake Superior and the Lake 
Erie ports which carry 6,000 tons. The river 
above and below Detroit, through which passes 
all this traffic, has become a busy thoroughfare. 
Puffing steam tugs, the little leviathans of our 
modern waters, ply back and forth between Lake 
Erie and Lake Huron, each one towing one or 
more sailing vessels. Freight and passenger 
steamers alternate with these. It is a procession 
of the world's industry. The vessels reported as 
passing Detroit in one day, in the height of the 
season, number above one hundred. 

Think of it ! Here is lumber from the sawmills 
of Michigan ; iron and copper ore from the mines 
of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior; coal for 
Chicago and Duluth, from the mines of Ohio and 
Pennsylvania; stone from Lake Erie quarries, to 
be used in the great buildings of Detroit, Chicago 



84 MARK H ANN A. 

and other western cities ; structural steel from the 
mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania, for bridges, ship- 
building and the business blocks of great cities ; 
provisions, oil, merchandise of every sort ; rep- 
resenting almost every department of human in- 
dustry. 

In all this vast movement of commerce Mr. 
Hanna has played and still plays a prominent 
part. The interests of M. A. Hanna & Co. are 
among the largest on the Lakes. 

The immense growth of the shipping business 
on the Lakes has been due in no small degree to 
Government aid and encouragement. At the ex- 
pense of Government, harbors have been im- 
proved, channels deepened, lighthouses estab- 
lished, canals and locks constructed ; and through 
legislation protecting American shipping from 
competition with Canadian vessels, the American 
vessel owners of the Lakes have been encour- 
aged and supported until now the building and 
managing of the Lake vessels gives employment 
to thousands of men, and brings prosperity to 
thousands of American homes. 

THE SHIP SUBSIDY BILL. 

It was but natural that Mr. Hanna, seeing the 
growth of the shipping interests on the Great 
Lakes, through the encouragement of Govern- 



MARKHANNA. 85 

ment, should have become interested in strength- 
ening the shipping interests of the coast. Mr. 
Hanna is a most patriotic American. He does 
not write poems of patriotism, in fact, he does not 
read them. If he did, he would admire the pa- 
triotism, not the poetry. 

But Mr. Hanna does what poets cannot do. He 
inaugurates and manages vast industrial and com- 
mercial enterprises, which shall make our coun- 
try prosperous and happy, and worthy to be writ- 
ten about by poets and other dreamers of dreams. 

Mr. Hanna is not content to have American 
flags on the flag-poles of our public parks, and on 
the schoolhouses of the land. He wants to see 
them waving from the masts of vessels all along 
the Atlantic coast. He wants to see them waving 
in the blue sky over the Great Lakes, from Michi- 
gan to New York State ; fluttering above the roll- 
ing waves of the Atlantic and Pacific, carrying 
the story of a great nation's prosperity to foreign 
lands. He wants to see the earth girdled with 
American flags, floating from the masts of Amer- 
ican ships; so that wherever the Sun-god Phoe- 
bus drives in his golden car he shall be saluted 
by this fluttering emblem. 

The Ship Subsidy Bill represented Mr. Han- 
na's plan for realizing this consummation so de- 
voutly to be wished. Undoubtedly Mr. Hanr:i 



86 MARKHANNA. 

was sincere and unselfish in his advocacy of this 
measure. Certainly he had no axe of his own to 
grind. Whatever faults the bill may have had, its 
avowed and unmistakable object was to build up 
American commercial interests, on lines which 
had long been followed in other enterprises as 
well as by other nations. 

"The tonnage under the American flag in the 
foreign trade, in 1861, was more than three 
times larger than in 1900," said Mr. Hanna in his 
Senate speech : "yet, our foreign commerce is 
fully four times larger now than then." 

Here is a fact, — surely a deplorable fact. This 
is not a theory, it is a condition. Facing this con- 
dition, Mr. Hanna proposed that something ought 
to be done. We can all agree with him on that 
point ; and as to zvhat ought to be done, we can 
trust the assembled wisdom and experience of 
Congress to determine that. Partisan politics are 
out of place, in the discussion of this question. It 
is one which concerns the interests of all citizens 
alike. 

Government encouragement and aid do not nec- 
essarily mean monopoly and robbery on the part 
of the interests involved. In the Lake Trade, 
rates of transportation have declined in proportion 
as the industry has grown. Thirty years ago, the 
rate on ore from Lake Superior was three to three 



MARK HANNA. 87 

and a half dollars a gross ton. The rate today is 
from sixty cents to one dollar. And yet, sailors and 
dock men are receiving larger wages than they 
did thirty years ago. All products in which these 
ores are used are cheaper now than then. The 
American people are richer because of this growth 
of the Lake vessel interests. These are facts, and 
they ought not to be lost sight of, in any discus- 
sion of this subject. 

THE GREAT AMERICAN EMPIRE. 

Mr. Hanna has been accused of representing 
Imperialism in America. So far as an Impe- 
rialism like that of ancient Rome or some modern 
European countries is concerned, the charge is 
absurd and groundless. But there is another sort 
of Imperialism which Mr. Hanna, or any other 
man, ought not to be ashamed of representing; 
that is, the growing commercial supremacy of 
what Chief Justice Marshall once called the 
American Empire. 

The United States is steadily gaining the lead 
in manufactures of all kinds. The wide world is 
her market. Gov. Shaw, of Iowa, states that the 
cost of railway transportation in this country is 
one-third less than that of Europe, and quotes 
statistics from England and Germany. This 
means advantage to our manufacturers. Amer- 



88 MARK H ANN A. 

ican enterprise is opening markets for American 
goods wherever ships can carry them. Anything 
that will increase our merchant marine will cer- 
tainly be an advantage to the entire country. 

It is a picture to inspire one with poetry and 
eloquence, — this Great American Empire rising- 
like a dream out of the wilderness of this west-j 
ern continent in so brief a period. The dawn- 
ing of the twentieth century sees this new na- 
tion leading the nations of the world. It is the 
Empire of the People. 

In the dark ages of the past, Imperialism meant 
the rule of one, and that one oftener bad than 
good. The Imperialism that is growing and 
shaping itself in this our great American Com- 
monwealth is the rule of a great and dominant 
People. 

To this superior race, half savage races must 
be as children, submitting to its beneficent do- 
minion. Shall we fear the outcome? Shall we 
accuse this People of tyranny and despotism? 

The march of destiny cannot be stayed. Fate 
hath pronounced her Word. Here in this new; 
world a new Empire shall arise and flourish ; the 
Empire of the People. 

Its flag shall float above the islands of the 
farthest seas. Dusky tribes shall sit beneath the 
shadow of its Eagle's wings. Its arms of steel 



MARKHANNA. 89 

shall clash for human brotherhood. Not slaves, 
not victims, shall its vanquished foes become ; but 
children, younger brethren, in a vast eternal fam- 
ily. 

The People's Empire ! Let it grow and 
strengthen ! No chance or accident of birth shall 
open gates to power or honor. Natural power, 
talent, wisdom, skill, shall rule. 

THE CORPORATION AND ITS MEN. 

One of the most common charges brought 
against Mr. Hanna is that he is the friend and 
patron of trusts and corporations. Those who 
know Mr. Hanna have learned that he is no 
more the friend of corporations than, he is the 
friend of the workingmen employed by corpora- 
tions. There is a certain class of demagogues 
who either do not see this fact, or who* dishon- 
estly ignore it and conceal it. 

The fact is, industrial organization is the 
friend and helper of the working man. 

It is not the friend of the lazy and the vicious, 
the blatant talker and the loud reformer ; but it 
serves the workers who are organized under its 
banner, and leads them to victory in the battle 
of industry. 

These officers, these generals and captains of 



90 MARKHANNA. 

industry, are the leaders of the rank and file, who 
could not fight without them. 

The day of military conquest has gone by. In 
this age we have occasional skirmishes to settle 
some petty quarrel. But the day of the Caesars, 
Alexanders, Napoleons, has gone, never to re- 
turn. 

The battle of today is the battle of Industry, 
the warfare of man against want, famine, and the 
elements of nature. Your workmen are the le- 
gions who march and fight. They cannot fight 
without officers and leaders. A leaderless army 
is a mob. 

In the old order of competition, these regi- 
ments were pitted against each other. The shoe- 
makers of one regiment, for instance, were wag- 
ing battle against the shoe-makers of another. 
This order of things is now rapidly giving place 
to a more rational mode of warfare. 

These regiments of industrial soldiers are 
uniting under one common standard, one com- 
mon leader. They are presenting a united front 
to the enemy. Before their solid ranks the de- 
mon-legions of hunger and want are fast retreat- 
ing. 

Shall we denounce this coalition, discharge 
and execute our officers, and as a blind and lead- 
erless mob set out to fight our battles? 



MARKHANNA. 91 

These Captains of Industry have good pay, as 
is their right. Your privates must not demand 
the pay of generals and coionels. They cannot 
obtain it, even by discharging these generals and 
colonels. Armies that mutiny and rebel usually 
end in dissolution and destruction. 

If any one supposes that I expect to convert 
all Socialists to these views, he is very much mis- 
taken. Too many Socialists are so not from rea- 
son, but rather from lack of reason. They are 
swayed by sentiment, if nothing worse. Many 
of them are bigoted and intolerant, full of carp- 
ing and denunciation, and no statement of rea- 
son appeals to them. Such,, when they have ex- 
hausted their every argument, will still point to 
their own poverty, and shriek, ''Here is an in- 
dubitable and indisputable fact. I am poor, 
Jones is rich. Why should this be so?" 

That there are good and benevolent people, 
even people of substantial means, who are Social- 
ists, I do not deny. That there are sane things 
in the doctrine of Socialism, I do not deny. But 
that Socialism is sound as a philosophical system 
I cannot believe. Its alleged benefits would be 
offset by so many positive evils, that it could not 
improve the general condition of society. Her- 
bert Spencer has clearly stated most of these evils 
in his "Plea for Liberty." 



92 MARK HAN N A. 

Socialism is despotism. In it, the individual 
would have no freedom. If unbridled individ- 
ualism may lead to tyranny and oppression, what 
might not Socialism lead to, with its ponderous 
machinery of government, its endless bureaus, 
the spoil of political knaves, its domination of 
the individual on every hand by the armed forces 
of the state? Surely, the larger freedom which 
we all long for does not lie in that direction. 

/ A PEN-PICTURE BY MR. WHITE. 

A sketch of Mr. Hanna by William Allen 
White, printed in McClure's Magazine for No- 
vember, 1900, is so brilliant and interesting that 
generous selections from it are given here, with 
the permission of the S. S. McClure Co., N. Y. : 

*'Mr. Herbert Spencer holds that life is a se- 
ries of relations, and that man and the other crea- 
tures of the earth are the reflections of their en- 
vironment. Assuming the truth of Spencer's con- 
tention, it may be instructive to know something 
of Marcus Alonzo Hanna's habitat. Cleveland, 
Ohio, like Falmouth, 'is a fine town, with ships in 
the bay.' The smoke of a thousand furnaces 
stains the sky, and the clang of iron with the tin- 
kle of gongs forms the din of a restless com- 
merce. It is a town of workers. Men talk busi- 
ness at the clubs and talk shop in the saloons ; 



MARKHANNA. 93 

they take their business to bed with them o' nights. 
There are beautiful homes on broad avenues, that 
lead away from the lowlands where forges glow. 
There are decent public buildings scattered along 
the streets where the tall, well-designed business 
houses do most congregate ; and there are pretty 
parks and respectable statues* and appropriate 
monuments in the wide public squares. The 
homes, the public buildings, the commercial 
strongholds, the parks and their adornments, are 
preeminently up to date. They are clearly pos- 
sessed of 'every modern convenience.' They 
would rent well. Down toward the mouth of one 
of the city caverns, before it spills its human 
stream into the industrial cauldron that swirls be- 
low the hills, stands a square, red-stone build- 
ing. In the sixth floor of this building is a suite 
of rooms. On the door entering this suite is the 

legend : 

M. A. HANNA & CO., 

Coal, Iron Ore, 

AND 

Pig Iron. 

The inner room of this suite is a large room. 
On the walls of the room, which is finished in 
mahogany, are a number of photographs of Han- 
na's home under the elm trees, surrounded by 
grass and flowers ; also photographs of the mem- 



94 MARK HAN N A. 

bers of the Republican National Committee, and 
a photograph of the interior of a power-house, 
where four huge engines — all trim and solid and 
mechanically eloquent of power — stand waiting 
the touch of the master to release their energy. 
The photographs look down on a heavy mahog- 
any director's table with massive round legs. On 
the table is a litter of blue prints — engines and 
architects' designs — embryo boats and power- 
houses, and smoke-stacks, and many strange 
cross-sections and ground views, and perspectives 
of industrial edifices. Solid chairs of nondescript 
design sit near the edge of a crimson rug. In a 
corner near the broad, deep window stands a mas- 
sive desk. At the desk, leaning heavily on a clut- 
ter of letters and documents, is a stocky, long- 
bodied man, with his small feet hooked desper- 
ately to the supports of a pivoting chair. He 
whirls about nervously, and his quizzical, humor- 
ous smile animates the place and humanizes it. 
Hanna's personality exudes from everything. The 
photographs of the great engines become vitally 
a part of him. The blue prints seem to crystallize 
themselves into him. The politicians' faces, the 
chairs, the table with the shapeless legs, all in an 
instant become living, component parts of this 
man's existence. The room, the building, the 
town on the inland sea — they are parts of him and 



MARKHANNA. 95 

products of him, and he is a part and product of 
them. 

Hanna is an American type. Five years ago he 
was engrossed in business. A crisis occurred in 
the country's history — partly of his own making. 
He sloughed off business. He became a political 
leader, and — as patriots go — a patriot. By sheer 
mechanical force, using money, the one lever 
which God gave him mastery of, Hanna set mil- 
lions of flags to waving, and manufactured and 
distributed, securely wrapped in packages of as- 
sorted sizes ready for immediate consumption, 
more lofty ideals of civic integrity than the coun- 
try had consumed before in a score of years. A 
weaker man than Hanna, with more emotion in 
his make-up, might have felt more deeply and 
perhaps more intelligently, but only a man like 
Hanna could have acted in the time of stress so 
wisely. With the cold, practical energy of a trip- 
hammer, Hanna converted dollars into patriot- 
ism, and saved the nation from calamity. While 
he was at his work men reviled him, bullied him, 
abused him — just as they do today. ■ 

"Which knowledge vexes him a space ; 

But while reproof around him rings, 
He turns a keen, untroubled face 

Home to the instant need of things." 




96 MARK HANNA. 

The story of his life epitomizes the biographies 
of thousands -of other successful Americans. It 
is the dramatization of energy — the romance of 
industrial achievement. In another one hundred 
years, perhaps, such romances will seem as re- 
mote from the life then living as stories of our 
Western border, bloody with Indian wars, ap- 
pear today. Opportunity may not always stand 
knocking on the gate for American youths. But 
at any rate, the story of Hanna's rise is a brave 
tale, and one well worth the telling, 

HANNA'S EARLY BUSINESS EXPE- 
RIENCE. 

Hanna was born in Ohio sixty-three years ago. 
Of his ancestry it is sufficient to say that he is a 
member of the Scotch-Irish society of Philadel- 
phia, in full communion and good standing. His 
grandfather was bound out to a Quaker, and for 
the one hundred years last past the Hannas have 
been Quakers. In i8S2 Hanna's father moved to 
Cleveland, and brought his seven children along. 
The elder Hanna started a grocery store, trading 
more or less in a wholesale way, on the lakes, par- 
ticularly in the Lake Superior country. Young 
Mark plodded through the public schools and got 
enough education to admit him to the Western 
Reserve University. But in 1857, after a year in 



MARK HANNA. 97 

college, he returned to Clevelajid to learn the 
grocery business, which was growing, and had 
become exclusively a wholesale concern, with cus- 
tomers all over the lake region. A year or so 
later the elder Hanna sickened, and the manage- 
ment of the store fell on the boy, Mark. It was a 
heavy load to carry for a young man, barely past 
his majority, but the responsibility put iron into 
him, and gave him the luck stone of his life— the 
habit of industry. It schooled him, as no uni- 
versity can, in the use of grit and self-reliance and 
courage. It made a man of him at the time of life 
when other youths are addicted to the picnic habit. 
In 1862 the father died, and the young man took 
charge of the business for the estate. When he 
closed up the store successfully five years later, 
he knew all about the grocery business, and his 
energy was proverbial in the town of Cleveland, 
^^e was thirty years old when he married, and 
' went into business with his father-in-law, Daniel 
P. Rhodes. The firm, Rhodes & Co., dealt in coal, 
iron ore, and pig iron. That was a generation 
ago. Young Hanna threw himself into that busi- 
ness with passionate enthusiasm. He learned the 
iron trade from the bottom, omitting no circum- 
stance. He was insatiably curious. He had an 
artist's thirst to know the how of things. He 
learned about coal mines and bought coal lands, 



98 MARKHANNA. 

learned about ore and bought mines, learned about 
boats and bought boats. Then he took his iron 
and his coal, and he built the first steel boats that 
ever plowed the lakes. He established foundries 
and forges and smelters. Men worked for him 
from Western Pennsylvania to the base of the 
Rockies. He knew his men and he knew the 
work they did. He knew the value of a day's 
work, and he got it — he also paid for it. Where 
there was labor trouble, the contest was short and 
decisive. Hanna met the men himself. Either 
things were right or they were wrong. If he 
thought they were wrong, he fixed them on the 
spot. If he believed they were right, the work 
went on. In the early seventies the miners in the 
Rhodes & Co.'s mines formed a union. Hanna 
studied the union as he studied mines and ores 
and ships. He mastered its details, got the hang 
of it, and got up another union — a union of em- 
ployers. Then when the men at a mine had trou- 
bles, they conferred not with the mine operator, 
but with the mine operators' union. The two 
unions got along without friction, until the walk- 
ing delegate found himself deposed, after which 
Hanna's union dissolved. But the mining oper- 
ators' union gave the first public recognition to 
organize labor which it had received at that time, 
and the invention was Hanna's. It was a practi- 



MARKHANNA. 99 

cal thing. After the dissolution of the mine op- 
erators' union there was trouble. A number of 
arrests followed some shaft burning. Hanna went 
down to Western Ohio to prosecute the men un- 
der arrest. They were defended by a young man 
named McKinley — William McKinley — and he 
did his work so well that most of the miners went 
scot-free, and those convicted got short terms. 
Hanna took a liking to the young lawyer whose 
tactics had won the legal battle which Hanna had 
lost. / A friendship began which is now famous 
in contemporaneous history, Hanna had won his 
point in the strike. Perhaps he was in a mellow 
expansive mood which may have tempered his ad- 
miration for the attorney for the strikers. y 

HANNA BRANCHES OUT. 

The regularity with which Hanna won in his 
labor contests gave him business prestige. He 
says that he never let the men deal fairer with 
him than he dealt with them. His office door 
swings inward as easily on its hinges for the dol- 
lar-a-day man as for the superintendent. But 
they say in Cleveland that there is an automatic 
spring on it for the chronic grumbler, for the 
shirker, and for the walking delegate. The door 
swings out upon these men with force and em- 
phasis. 



100 MARK H ANN A. 

iFor Hanna is a hard worker. He asks none 
of his employees to work as hard as he does. He 
has the intelhgence which makes work easy and 
increases the capacity to do work. Genius is 
something of that sort. Hanna's secret is system. 
After he had reduced mining to a system, he add- 
ed shipping, then he reduced that to a system and 
took on shipbuilding. Reducing that to its low- 
est terms, where the machinery works smoothly, 
Hanna built a street railway — made the cars of 
his coal and iron, and the rails of his steel. When 
he came to man that railway — the Cleveland City 
Street Railway — he had reduced the labor prob- 
lem to such an exact science that there has never 
been a strike on that system, although the cars 
of other lines in Cleveland are tied up frequently. 
About this time he took a fancv to the theatrical 

ml 

business. He bought the town opera house and 
began studying the gentle art of making friends 
with the theatrical stars of the world. He learned 
the business of friendship thus as thoroughly as 
he learned the iron and coal and steel and ship and 
railway business. He omitted no detail ; he went 
the whole length — put on a play by Mr. Howells, 
and invited the author out to see the job done 
properly. Today Hanna has the friendship of 
men like Jefferson, Irving, Francis Wilson, Rob- 
son, Crane — all of them, arid the best of the play- 



MARK HAN N A. loi 

Wrights. They know the appreciative eyes that 
laugh so easily, and he knows all the actors' 
stories and can find the paths that lead to their 
hearts. In the early eighties — apparently by way 
of diversion or because Satan finds some evil work 
for idle hands to do — when the coal, iron ore, pig 
iron, steel, shipping, railway, and theatrical busi- 
ness became nerve-wracking monotony, Hanna 
started a bank. He took the presidency of it, and 
devoured the minutiae of the new business raven- 
ously. When he was watching the wheels go 
around, looking at the levers and cogs, and mak- 
ing the bank part of his life, Hanna began to no- 
tice remarkable movements in the works. Some 
years the fly-wheel would not revolve. At other 
times it whirled too rapidly. He went through 
the machinery with hammer and screws, but he 
found that the trouble lay outside the bank. He 
traced it to iron ore, through that to coal, and 
still it eluded him. The trouble was outside the 
things, he knew. It was in the lodestone of poli- 
tics. 

GOES INTO POLITICS. 

^ So Hanna went into politics. In 1880 he organ- 
ized the Cleveland Business Men's Marching 
Club. The idea was a new one, and it took all 
over the country. That was the year when the 



102 MARK H ANN A. 

tariff began to assume proportions as a national 
issue, and being a dealer in coal and iron and steel 
ships, Hanna made a discovery. Heretofore busi- 
ness had been business, and politics politics ; the 
hypothesis that business and politics were allied 
was a theory in the nebular state, floating around 
in class-rooms and debating societies. Hanna con- 
gealed the theory into fact. The business man in 
politics was Hanna's invention twenty years ago. 
During the eighties he carried a torch in many 
parades ; but the oil that leaked from the can lu- 
bricated his mind, for he ground up the facts of 
politics rapidly. He began at the ward caucus, 
and for ten years was a factor in his ward and in 
his county and in his State. He took up politics 
as a branch of his business. It was a side issue — 
but shipbuilding was, for that matter, and street 
railways. Hanna has a dozen sides. In 1888 
Hanna had learned the business of politics well 
enough to go into the National market with a 
product. In the National Convention which nomi- 
nated Benjamin Harrison for his first term, 
Hanna appeared as John Sherman's political man- 
ager. He was to Sherman then what he was to 
McKinley in 1896. When Sherman lost, Hanna 
went on the Advisory Council of the National 
Committee. He learned how the machinery of 
National politics runs ; what its fly-wheels do ; 



MARK HANNA. 103 

what its pulleys move ; where to oil it ; and where 
the power is generated. His insatiable curiosity, 
that made him master of other great trades, made 
him adept in what is known as practical politics. 
During the eight years that followed Hanna's 
entrance into National politics, he absorbed cer- 
tain facts about the relations of business and pol- 
itics. Without knowing where his greed for facts 
was leading him, Hanna became an amateur po- 
litical scientist. He knew none of the rules of the 
game as the books laid them down ; the theories of 
scholars were unfathomed in his reckonings. But, 
as the Yankees say, he "sensed a scheme" of the 
relations of things in the worlds of business and 
politics, and unconsciously this scheme took pos- 
session of him. 

Now, a man whose business leads him to the 
daily contemplation of men working in their un- 
dershirts is not going to sit down and dream up 
an economic system for a world full of men in 
Nile-green neckties and lavender trousers. The 
spectacle of human perspiration is not so entirely 
shocking to a man of Hanna's habits and antece- 
dents that any scheme of his would eliminate it 
from human existence. So the idea that got in 
Hanna's head was not particularly Utopian. It 
was simply a scheme to provide for more work, 
more sweat, more business, and more dividends — 



104 MARK HAN N A. 

and that wasn't the least of Hanna's considera- 
tion — by adjusting the tariff on coal, iron, pig 
iron, and a few thousand other articles too nu- 
merous to mention ; also the establishment of a 
government subsidy for American shipbuilders. 
Incidentally Hanna saw that the currency shaft of 
the National works was crooked and wobbly, and 
needed straightening. Now this was not an ec- 
static dream. But it had a vital advantage over 
the vision of Mr. Bellamy and the Utopians. 
Hanna's plan would work. 

In the industrial depression from 1893 to 1895, 
when the mines and the furnaces and the ships 
were idle, Hanna had time for meditation. But 
the desire to make his scheme of political science 
a fact was afire in him ; and instead of going into 
a rhapsody at the beauty of his dream, Hanna 
spent his hours of meditation forging his dream 
into reality in an eminently practical way. 

HANNA AND McKINLEY. 

In the meantime, for twenty years, his friend- 
ship for the young lawyer who defended the 
miners had been growing. He grappled it to him 
as he grappled his business ambition — with all his 
heart and mind. It became as much a part of him 
as the mines and the ships and the steel things that 
he loved. McKinley satisfied something in Hanna. 



MARK HANNA. 105 

The Canton lawyer was industrious. He was 
clean. He was reliable. He was ambitious. Han- 
na's friendship displayed these virtues in the 
market of public esteem, and held them at their 
par value. In 1896 Hanna's energy incorporated 
McKinley, and every business house in the United 
States, from Wall Street to the carpenter's shop 
on the alley, took stock. Hanna promoted the 
candidacy of McKinley before the St. Louis Con- 
vention. He put in that campaign, which ended 
in the St. Louis Convention, every trained faculty 
which had made him a successful captain of trade. 
The outcome was interesting. And American 
politicians — generally a slipshod lot — who depend 
much on brass bands and claqueing and flag wav- 
ing and oratory and beating of tom-toms to swarm 
their bees, were astounded to see a campaigner use 
the calculating, exact, business-like methods of a 
general manager of a railroad. Every Republi- 
can Presidential candidate sent out letters by the 
bushel. Hanna sent McKinley's letters out by 
the peck. But he picked his correspondents with 
the care that he picked the officers for his lake 
ships. It was Hanna's purpose to give the pre- 
ferred stock in the McKinley syndicate only to 
men of commercial honor and business standing 
and political capacity. : The whisperer, the Janus- 
face, the blow-hard, and the promiser were per- 



io6 MARK HANNA. 

mitted to speculate if they chose, but only upon 
the general prosperity series. The St. Louis 
Convention was a meeting of a large board of di- 
rectors in a business concern. All emotionalism 
was as remote from the constitution of that body 
as a sky-rocket from a table of statistics. Hanna 
had planned the syndicate, he had promoted it, 
he had made it go. He didn't know who would 
make the motions, nor who would write up the 
minutes, nor what phrasing would be used in the 
prospectus. But he knew the men in the major- 
ity, and he knew that they were there to vote for 
'McKinley, and he knew that they were men 
who accomplish their ends. It was an old 
story to Hanna — the picking and handling of 
men. There are 8,000 men on his pay-roll at 
Cleveland — on the docks, and in the mines, and 
at furnaces, and at desks, and on grip cars. 
There were one-tenth as many delegates at St. 
Louis ; and besides, the St. Louis Convention 
was a cooperative corporation. So Hanna didn't 
worry. Yet certain things puzzled him. Despite 
the fact that reporters and editors of what might 
have been called, with professional courtesy, the 
loathed but esteemed contemporaries, said un- 
pleasant things in double-leads and short para- 
graphs, and claimed that the convention was 
sewed up in a sack; and more, that it was 



MARK HANNA. 107 

branded, gagged, and delivered ; and, still fur- 
ther, that it was the personal property, chattel, 
and common appurtenant of Mark Hanna and of 
his heirs and assigns forever ; affairs took a turn 
that would have astounded Hanna if he had 
claimed property right in the delegates. For 
Hanna went into the battle for McKinley's nom- 
ination with a seven-devil lust for tariffs. The 
currency question was one of those things 
dreamed of in Hanna's philosophy, along with 
the civil service and the Alaskan boundarv and 
Cuban independence. Hanna did not oppose the 
gold standard ; but while he was struggling for 
the nomination of McKinley, Hanna seems to 
have believed that by taking thought of the cur- 
rency question he could not add one cubit to Mc- 
Kinley's stature. So he sat in his office in Cleve- 
land and listened to the saurian snort of his barge 
whistles, and fixed his faith in ad valorems and 
tariffs and other impedimenta of his campaign. 

THE GOLD STANDARD. 

As the spring of 1896 opened, the earnestness 
of the New England Republicans for a gold- 
standard declaration amazed Hanna. He went 
to the St. Louis Convention with his amazement 
unabated ; he was not angry. But it was as 
though all the men on the Cleveland City Rail- 



io8 MARK HAN N A. 

way had decided to paint their left ear green, 
something which they have a perfect right to 
do, but which does not add to the speed of the 
cars nor the service of the hne. He did not fear 
the outcome — so far as McKinley was concerned 
— but it did not occur to Hanna, when he went 
to St. Louis, that the adoption of the gold-stand- 
ard declaration in the Republican platform 
would relegate the tariff question to a place in 
the campaign beside pensions and the interstate 
commerce. And so because the men he trusted — 
and needed — favored a declaration for gold, 
Hanna accepted it ; and because he does nothing 
by halves, thereafter he fought for the gold- 
standard plank; its ways were his ways, its peo- 
ple were his people, and its enemies provoked his 
wrath. / 

When the party's platform had been reported 
by the Committee on Resolutions, and the clause 
endorsing the gold standard had been read, Sen- 
ator Teller of Colorado made a speech favoring 
the adoption of a minority report of the Reso- 
lutions Committee, which report eliminated the 
gold-standard declaration. While Teller spoke, 
a pudgy man — broad-shouldered and of robust 
girth — sat fidgeting in his chair, but one row re- 
moved from the aisle, among the Ohio delegates. 
It was Hanna. The loose skin around his mouth 



MARK H ANN A. 109 

twitched irritably as Teller's swan-song rose and 
fell. Occasionally he lifted a broad hand to a 
large, bumpy cranium, as if to scratch. Instead, 
he rubbed the rich, healthy, terra-cotta hide on 
his full, firm neck. His bright brown eyes took 
the orator's mental and moral measure with mer- 
ciless precision. When Teller sat down, Hanna 
grunted his relief. Others spoke in favor of the 
Teller resolution — perhaps an Idaho man, maybe 
a Montanan, from a chair behind the Ohio delega- 
tion. A dapper little chap, with a boutonniere 
on his perfectly fitting frock coat, came chas- 
sezing festively down the rostrum, and received 
Chairman Thurston's recognition. ''Who's that?" 
asked Hanna of Grosvenor. 

''Cannon." 

"Who's Cannon?" 

Mind you, it was Hanna who was asking 
these questions — Hanna, who was popularly sup- 
posed to be omniscient and omnipotent at St. 
Louis that day. Yet here was a senator whom 
Hanna did not know, and whose presence on 
the speaker's list surprised the man who held 
the convention in the hollow of his hand. 

"Senator — Utah," replied Grosvenor. 

The festive man opened his mouth to read his 
address. 

"Well, for heaven's sake, goin' to read it! 



no MARK H ANN A. 

Lookee there — " And Hanna's broad, fat hand 
waved towards the orator. 'Terty, ain't he?" 

"Looks Hke a cigar drummer!" 

The man on the rostrum continued. He made 
an acrid reference to the gold standard. 

''Well, d — n him — how did he get in here?" 
snapped Hanna, and no one could answer. 

A small-boned, fat leg flopped across its mate, 
and Hanna changed his weight from one hunker 
to the other. 

Cannon's remarks were growing more and 
more luminous. Hanna's brown eyes began to 
glow in heat lightning as the oration proceeded. 
His twitching mouth spilled its rage in grunts. 
The rhetoric of the Utah man was telling. He 
began to threaten to leave the party. Finally 
he put the threat into a flamboyant period. Then 
Hanna's harsh voice blurted: 

"Go, go !" 

There was a tragic half-second's silence. Ten 
thousand eyes turned toward Hanna. Evidently 
he could feel their glances hailing on his back, 
for his flinty auburn head bobbed down like a 
cork, and an instant later, when the whole con- 
vention was firing "go's" at the rostrum, Hanna 
rose proudly from the small of his back, and got 
on the firing line. After that the Utah man was 
in the hands of a mob. Hanna devoted himself 



MARK HANNA. iii 

to the pleasurable excitement of the chase. He 
stormed and roared with the mob ; he guyed and 
he cheered with the mob. He was of it, led by it, 
whooping it up. Then, when it was all over, 
when the gold-standard platform had been adopt- 
ed, Hanna climbed into his chair, clasped his 
hands composedly behind him, threw back 
his head, let out his voice, and sang ''America" 
with the throng. When he forgot the words, 
his dah-dah-de-dah-de-dums rang out with patri- 
otic felicity, and his smile of seraphic satisfac- 
tion was a good sight for sore eyes. For 
Mark Hanna was giving an excellent representa- 
tion of a joyous American citizen, with his wa- 
gon hitched to a bucking star, jogging peace- 
fully down the milky way of victory. 

HANNA IS HUMAN. 

By this token may the gentle reader know that 
Hanna is intensely human. There is nothing 
god-like, nothing demoniac, nothing cherubic, 
nothing serpentine about him. He is a plain man, 
who stands in the last ditch with his friends, and 
fights his enemies to the death. He enjoys a 
good joke, a good fellow, or a good dinner; and, 
if possible, likes all three served at the same 
table. Often he wins brilliantly, sometimes loses 
conspicuously, makes a fool of himself occasion- 



112 MARK H ANN A. 

ally, laughs at it good-naturedly, and does it 
over again, ''even as you and I." He has on his 
bones the clay of the unexplainable old Adam — 
rich in weakness and strength, graces and foibles, 
and withal he has the philosophy which sustained 
the shepherd of Arden. So his strength is more 
than his weakness, for he has the virility of com- 
mon sense. He is not happy crocheting tidies 
and adopting ringing resolutions. He is a man 
of deeds rather than of explanations. 

Hanna is not a man of exalted ideals. Between 
his purpose and its execution the path lies in a 
straight line. If gentlemen in spectacles come 
along the path, stretching across strings of eth- 
ical obstacles, and planting in it the potsherds of 
transcendental philosophic scruples, Hanna push- 
es forward to his end, kicking away the strings 
and crushing the pottery under his feet. 

Later, if he has time, he devotes a few lurid 
minutes to the spectacled gentry before he closes 
the incident with a bang and goes about his busi- 
ness. Hanna is perfectly willing to admit that • 
beyond the Alps lies Italy and that the hills are 
green afar off ; but he insists on his American 
privilege of voting for the majority report. In 
politics Hanna is a partisan. With him the long- 
nosed, short-chinned mugwump is entitled to the 
same consideration due to the guerilla in time of 



MARK H ANN A. 113 

war. Hanna would endorse a political proposi- 
tion not authorized by his party caucus and his 
party platform about as readily as a general 
would take orders from a newspaper. In his 
party Hanna has disputes, differences, and con- 
tentions. But he knows when he is whipped, and 
respects a similar knowledge in his adversary. 
When a fight is over, it is over with Hanna. He 
bears no malice, carries no knife from the con- 
flict to use another day, and he has a scorching 
contempt for the contentious — and to Hanna im- 
possible — persons who insist that a question is 
never settled until it is settled right. From Han- 
na's point of view the ways of the reformer and 
of ''the serpent on the rock" are beyond under- 
standing. 

HANNA NOT A DEMAGOGUE. 

For Hanna's solicitude for the people is as ten- 
der as that of the late William H. Vanderbilt. 
Hanna believes in every man for himself and the 
devil take the hindermost. He does not fawn 
upon the failures of life, nor mince matters in 
locating the blame for their condition. Every 
good cause has produced its demagogues, who 
are as dangerous to progress as the opponents 
of the cause. And although Hanna has been 
grilled in cartoons as a money devil with dollar 



114 MARK HAN N A. 

marks for scales ; has been sizzled in public scorn 
as a conscienceless boss ; has been called a crusher 
of labor, an industrial octopus, a commercial Mo- 
loch, and every manner of bird or beast on earth, 
in the air above, or in the v^aters beneath, his bit- 
terest enemies in their most interesting flights of 
vituperation have not added to the gayety of na- 
tions by calling Mark Hanna a demagogue. Such 
an appellation v^^ould be as grotesque as to call 
Jay Gould a protagonist or "Mr. Toots" an icon- 
oclast. 

If a large, jagged, brown damn is needed in 
a diplomatic situation, Hanna furnishes it. If a 
laugh is needed, Hanna has it and is not afraid 
to use it. If an open fight is required, Hanna 
makes it. He is a man of simple instincts and 
single purposes. His relations with certain of 
his senatorial colleagues were arranged in their 
biological development millions of years ago. 
For instance, the velvet-pawed feline tactics of 
former Senator Quay set Hanna to baying deep- 
mouthed imprecations and kicking out behind 
him the loam of recent alluvial reminiscence. It 
is not that Hanna is so entirely displeased with 
what Quay does as with the way it is done, for 
Hanna is no prude. He has a conscience — ^the 
conventional conscience of commerce. To him 
wrong is wrong, and right is right. Everything 



MARK HANNA. 115 

is either black or white; he is color-blind to the 
pea greens and heliotropes and electric blues of 
conduct. If a man lies, he lies ; if he steals, he is 
a thief ; if he cheats, he is a liar and a thief ; and 
that's the end of him with Hanna. He likes a 
man with good red blood and a strenuous spirit 
and common sense; as for the other sort, they 
are all one to him — the sort that ''m.ight be made 
after supper of a cheese paring," and he will have 
none of the breed. 

Yet in national politics Hanna is a strong man, 
exceptionally so. He is efficient. He is domi- 
nant in his party. Yet in his domination he does 
not domineer. He accomplishes his end ; but not 
by diplomacy, not by playing man upon man, not 
like Pontius Pilate, but like Herod. Hanna is a 
force, not an intrigue. Politics is not his trade ; 
he is a business m^an first and a politician after- 
wards ; yet he is not a dilettante politician. When 
he gets in tight places, as in the senatorial elec- 
tion of '97, he does not fight with the foils, but 
rough and tumble, hand to hand, and with such 
clubs, dornicks, and other loose furniture of the 
environment as the devil may have put in his 
reach. 

So much for what may be called the dramatis 

personae of Hanna. Now to return to the plot. 

After the St. Louis Convention, Hanna played 



ii6 MARK HAN N A. 

with the party machine, running it at full speed 
and high pressure from June till November. Then 
he slipped the belt from his engines and let the 
wheels of the machine run down. His great in- 
dustrial and financial concerns on the lake were 
grinding away smoothly and needed but half his 
power. His piston-rods were thumping in his 
head with nothing to hold them. The throbbing 
and jolting of his wild engines must have strained 
his nerves, for before the world knew what had 
happened Hanna had flipped a belt into the 
United States Senate. But speed in that mill is 
slow and the grist is light, wherefore there is a 
loss of power and a wearing jar. 

SIGNS OF AGE. 

Hanna seems to be ten years older than he 
was four years ago. The ruddy terra-cotta skin 
that glowed with health in 1896 has faded to an 
ashen pink. The mobile smile that was a conver- 
sation without words is hardening a little — but 
only a little. The lower parts of his legs are 
slightly uncertain, and his feet almost shuffle. 
The large, firm hand grips his cane with some- 
thing like nervousness. The thin hair hangs 
more listlessly to the head than it used to hang; 
but the jaws are wired with steel, and the brown 
eyes — and these are Hanna's harbor lights — • 



MARK HANNA. 117 

twinkle with the fervor of a schoolboy's. They 
show forth an unconquered soul and a merry 
heart, which maketh a glad countenance. Han- 
na's life at Washington has not taken the edge 
from his humanity. Indeed, so far as he bears 
any relation to the present National administra- 
tion, Hanna is the human touch. 

/The relations existing between Hanna and his 
•friend William McKinlev, President of the 
United States, are particularly interesting. The 
popular notion of these relations is derived from 
newspaper cartoons. Probably at least 5,000,000 
of the 15,000,000 citizens who will vote at the 
coming election imagine that Hanna tramps noi- 
sily into the White House every morning, gruffly 
gives his orders for the day's administration to 
the shivering President, and then walks out and 
continues to grind the faces off the poor ; but the 
real relations existing between Hanna and Mc- 
Kinley are stranger than fiction. It is McKin- 
ley, not Hanna, that controls. The masterful, 
self-willed, nimble-witted, impetuous, virile Han- 
na in the presence of the placid, colorless, im- 
perturbable, emotionless, diplomatic, stolid Mc- 
Kinley becomes superficially deferential and con- 
siderate of the Presidential dignity, almost to an 
unnecessary degree. It is known to all men at all 
familiar with McKinley's administration, that in 



ii8 MARK H ANN A. 

the differences which have come up in the dis- 
cussion of administrative affairs, when Hanna 
has been consulted at all, he has almost invariably 
yielded his opinion to McKinley's. The friend- 
ship — one might call it almost the infatuation 
of Hanna for McKinley — is inexplicable on any 
other theory save that of the affinity of opposites. 
History has often paralleled this affair, but has 
never fully explained her parallels." 



, MURAT HALSTEAD'S SKETCH. 

The following selections are from an article on 
Marcus A. Hanna, by Murat Halstead, in the Re- 
view of Reviews : 

"There is a new man in our politics, a recog- 
nized power, well known in spite of his novelty; 
not a professional statesman, but a man of 
affairs; a business man one of the most famous 
politicians; a quiet man, but making a noise in 
the world; a national personage with interna- 
tional reputation; a man of simple manners and 
broad shoulders, who has tested his strength in 
matters material and bears golden sheaves from 
harvest fields. He is a laborer on large lines, and 
he conducts a presidential candidacy as he has 
conducted fleets and managed mines, on the great 
lakes, developing resources and applying them 



MARK HANNA. 119 

with courage and capacity and with honorable 
distinction and affluent success.. 

"There is no name in all the land more famil- 
iar, and he accepts conspicuity with complacency, 
because it is unavoidable in the business; but he 
avoids ostentation, and when weighty cares per- 
mit the indulgence of his preferred enjoyments, 
they are in the retirement of his beautiful home. 
He has not sought to draw the public gaze and 
he does not shrink from it. He is without the 
perturbation of vanity or the affectation of indif- 
ference. 

''Marcus Alonzo Hanna was born in New Lis- 
bon, Columbiana County, Ohio, September 24, 
1837. Columbiana County, Ohio, borders on the 
eastern line of the state, and on the west adjoins 
the County of Stark, the home of McKinley, and 
on the east is bounded by Beaver County, Penn- 
sylvania, the home of Senator Quay. His blood 
is that of Virginia Friends and Vermont Presby- 
terians, and there are in it eminently the quali- 
ties that yield vigor and tenacity, and a solemn, 
sombre, fiery perseverance. One of his gifts is 
that of continuance. There is no better blood, 
and when brains are born with it the combina- 
tion is excellence — and Hanna inherited ability 
and was educated in business. 

"Next to the efficacy of good brains and blood 



"l- 



I20 MARK H ANN A. 

in making up a man comes his environment — the 
circumstances surrounding the boy and the man 
— the conditions upon which are opened in his 
neighborhood the golden gates of opportunity. 
We have said Mr. Hanna was educated in busi- 
ness, but we must not neglect to say that he had;* 
a high school education, and a year in one of the: 
Ohio colleges. 

''Mr. Hanna was born, as Major McKinley 
was, in the heart of the region richest in natural 
resources of any in the country — and unsur- 
passed in the world — western Pennsylvania and 
eastern Ohio. The coal beds are there deep 
and rich. There oil was struck in unparalleled 
rivers of wealth, and natural gas was at length 
revealed. The manufacturing towns of Ohio 
west and north of Columbiana and Stark coun- 
ties are among the finest examples on the conti- 
nent of the enterprise, the hardihood, the skill, 
the inventive and mechanical ingenuity, the gen- 
ius for organization, the cunning hands, the com- 
petent heads of the American people. This was; 
the environment of McKinley and Hanna, in: 
their most impressionable days, and their asso- 
ciation in after times may be traced to the sympa- 
thies of their earliest contemplative years.^--^' 

"It was but natural that while one became a 
lawyer and statesman and the other a business 



MARK HANNA. 121 

man who plowed the unsalted seas, and delved in 
the unsalted mines of the majestic northwest, they 
should come together in a common cause regard- 
ing which the sentiments of their boyhood be- 
came the convictions of their manhood. It is a 
silly sort of slander that attributes to such men 
only sordid motives. Such selfishness as they 
have is enlightened, and their first lessons taught 
them that the enactment into national law of the 
principle of protection was the indispensable 
foundation of the higher prosperity of the people 
of their native land. 

"Mr. Hanna is a man of large estate, but he has 
no idle hours or dollars. He is active in capital 
and labor, and an example that head and hands 
may work together with profit and show each 
other fair play. He holds the respect of work- 
ingmen because he treats them with respect, and 
he gains their good will because he is fair, and in 
nothing does he show them greater con^deration 
than in never trying the blandishments of dema- 
gogues with them. 

"Mr. Hanna's father, on removing to Cleve- jy^ 
land, became a wholesale grocer and provision 
merchant, and the son at twenty years of age was 
a clerk in the store, and in 1861 his father died 
and he succeeded to the business. Young Han- 
na had traveled extensively and formed a valuable 



X 



122 MARK H ANN A. 

acquaintance. In 1864 he married Miss Augusta 
Rhodes, the daughter of his senior partner, D. P. 
Rhodes, who retired a few years later, when the 
existing firm of M. A. Hanna & Co. was organ- 
ized. The business of the firm required a great 
deal of transportation on the lake. Hanna, after 
being interested in several vessels, became the 
proprietor of one named for his father, Leonard 
Hanna, and he is now a large owner of ships on 
the lakes and the head of the Globe Iron Works 
Company of shipbuilders. The course of his busi- 
ness is plainly marked as a system of progression. 
First a grocer, then a shipowner, — the ships 
growing out of and sailing in the requirements of 
trade ; then, as he wanted ships, he became a ship- 
builder, and as he consumed iron he developed 
ores. 

''His handsome residence is famous for hos- 
pitality, and it is administered with a geniality 
and liberality that gain and give pleasure. He 
values too highly the blessing of health to neglect 
it, and takes exercise regularly. His good humor 
and courtesy disarm even hostile reporters, and 
they are soon convinced of the cleverness of 
friendliness, and commune with him in the man- 
ner of confidential affection; but he never by 
chance tells them anything he does not intend 
they should find out. The artists who have ex- 



MARK HAN N A. 123 

erted their capacities for caricature, and who do 
not hesitate to portray him as a monster, find it 
aids their art with a touch of nature to draw him 
with a smiHng face. Whatever they do they do 
that, and they are at a loss to know how their 
arrows, that they have tipped with rancor, fail to 
inflict a wound or a sting. 

*'In the same corner of the state of Ohio where 
Hanna was born and has always lived are the 
homes of John Sherman, James A. Garfield and 
William McKinley. Sherman was born in an- 
other part of the state, but through all his profes- 
sional and public life he lived at Mansfield, 
which is within an hour's ride of Canton. Gar- 
field lived closer to Cleveland than the others, 
and in behalf of these three neighbors of his 
Mark Hanna, the business man, became Hanna 
the politician; not that he cared for the excite- 
ment or was fond of display, or thought that 
there was anything but hard work and the gen- 
eral good in it for him. He was in agreement 
with Sherman, Garfield and McKinley in princi- 
ple, and has believed of each of them that his 
election to the presidency would be the elevation 
of the standard of dignity, honor and prosperity 
of the country. He was Garfield's friend, but had 
little to do with the nomination of the second 
martyr President, and took a serious but not ex- 



124 MARK HAN N A. 

travagant or absorbing interest in his election. It 
was Mr. Hanna's judgment, and it was justified, 
that John Sherman's services to the country in 
his financial policy, through which was achieved 
the resumption of specie payments, were not rec- 
ognized as they should be, and he is still of that 
opinion. 

'The proceedings preliminary to the convention 
of 1888 brought McKinley and Hanna often to- 
gether. They were in consultation many times 
and it was a labor of zeal for them to canvass the 
country for Sherman and muster his forces. 
The keen eyes of Hanna were upon McKinley 
and found his nature that of the simplicity and 
nobility of manly sincerity. The X rays are not 
more penetrating than Hanna's glance, and his 
hearty respect for his friend was converted to 
warm regard and admiration. With McKinley's 
frankness and clearness, his transparency re- 
vealed his probity; and in his turn he rejoiced in 
the strength of the strong man by his side. 
There was no compact between them, they were 
of the same mind. 

"Their friendship was welded during this con- 
vention. They formed the liking of the unlike, 
that is an attachment greater than is given to 
those cast of like metal in the same mold. It 
would have been shirking an obligation, the out- 



MARK HANNA. 125 

growth of sympathy, association and common 
principles, and an attempt to evade destiny, if 
Mark Hanna had not consented to manage the 
presidential campaign of McKinley. 

"It is a blunder on the part of those who assail 
Mr. Hanna to hold that he is exclusively or ex- 
ceptionally a man of dollars. He has had enough 
of them long enough to know the weakness as 
well as the power of money, and his primary ad- 
vantage in his political activities is his respon^i- 
\bility — not in the collection of contributions or 
application of funds, but in the potentiality with 
which he can refuse the demands that are unrea- 
sonable and reason to conclusions. There is 
economy in his ability — and the accusation that 
he is a professional purchaser of men is an exag- 
geration of an imagination. 

"Mr. Hanna is the new man in politics, the man 
of affairs of his own, finding time for unofficial 
business. This is not of evil ; there is not a bet- 
ter sign of better things. The element of which 
Mr. Hanna is a type is needed to stand firmly for 
the balances of power with which the fathers con- 
served the Republic — and this representation of 
the ancient civic and national pride in our gov- 
ernment under the Constitution as it is, has not 
come to us without cause, or appeared too soon. 
Mr. Hanna will deserve well of his country that 



126 



MARK HANNA. 



he Is serving for the sake of principle with mo- 
tives and for considerations that contemplate 
only his fair share, as a laborious and faithful cit- 
izen, of the general welfare." 



OTHER ESSAYS. 



PLUTOPHOBIA. 
(From Social Laws.) 
There is an incredibly large element of the 
American people to whom the sight or thought 
of a rich man is as a red rag to an angry bull. At 
once there is furious snorting and bellowing, and 
pawing of the earth ; and if the red rag could be 
got at, it would be torn to shreds. No one can 
realize the extent of this disease, which I ven- 
ture to name plutophobia, unless he has mingled 
much with the working classes, or read the pa- 
pers which are published ostensibly in their in- 
terests. Speak of Carnegie, for mstance, and at 
once he is denounced for a plutocrat and a robber. 

But, you say, consider his benevolence! Has 
he not given his millions to the public welfare? 

''He has robbed his workmen of this wealth. 
He deserves no credit for his seeming benevo- 
lence. Let him do justice to his workmen,^ and 
he will not have these millions to give away !'' 

It is vain to say that, having got these millions, 
he might have kept them all if he had chosen to 



128 OTHER ESSAYS. 

do so. You will get no word of kindness for him. 
He is rich. That is his crime. And has it in- 
deed come to this, that success in America shall 
make a man hated and despised by large numbers 
of his fellow-citizens? 

"MARK HANNA." 

A common illustration of this trait in our work- 
ing people may be found in the contempt ex- 
pressed by so many of them and their political 
representatives for the figure of M. A. Hanna, 
the political manager of the Republican party 
during the last two presidential campaigns. The 
papers of the opposition, from the respectable 
democratic organ to the vituperative and despica- 
ble socialistic handbill, teem with coarse and 
brutal caricature of a man whose only known 
offense is that he has represented the cause of 
Success and Prosperity, rather than that of pau- 
perism and failure. This Napoleon of politics, 
who marshalled the Republican armies and led 
them to victory, against all the allied forces of 
Democracy, is the hcte noire of all pauperdom. 
They picture him as a fat Nero, fiddling and 
laughing over burning Rome. A Democratic 
newspaper relates with evident relish that a poor 
Russian immigrant, applying for naturalization 
papers, replied to a question as to our form of 



OTHER ESSAYS. 129 

government that ''Mark Hanna is King!" As 
to our method of making laws, he thought that 
Mark Hanna made them, conferring sometimes 
with Mr. McKinley ! Such were the conceptions 
he had formed evidently upon the statements of 
his associates. 

HANNA COMPARED WITH WASHING- 
TON. 

It is needless to say that the moral character 
of a great leader in war or politics is not to be 
estimated by Sunday-school criterions. Men who 
practise the Golden Rule, and keep all the Com- 
mandments, do not gain laurels in these fields of 
action. A Sunday-school teacher,, having told 
her class how Washington, when leader of the 
colonial forces, wrote a false letter of instruc- 
tions to his officers, for the purpose of letting the 
enemy capture it to their own discomfiture, fin- 
ished by asking whether this were not a kind of 
lie. The pupils agreed that it was. 

"But," asked the teacher, "was he not the 
George Washington who could not tell a lie about 
the cherry tree?" 

This puzzled the class, until one bright little 
fellow exclaimed, "Oh, but that was when he was 
a little boy !" 

The idea that maturity of judgment brings 



I30 OTHER ESSAYS. 

certain privileges and immunities in ethical mat- 
ters may have occurred also to Mr. Hanna. Hav- 
ing to fight the devil of bribery and deceit, he 
may have been compelled to sanction the use of 
fire. 

MR. HANNA'S WEALTH. 

But Mr. Hanna has not been so hated merely 
because he has employed in politics the methods 
in common use even by the best of his opponents. 
He has been hated because he is rich, and has 
represented the cause of the prosperous. His 
caricaturists represent him in clothing covered 
with $ marks. One cartoonist used this mark 
ingeniously as the motif for all the decorations 
of the room in which he pictured his subject. It 
seemed as though the valiant knights of the 
brush could never tire of repeating this symbol- 
ism. 

Rich? How got he his riches? By zeal, in- 
dustry, ability. When we stop men from get- 
ting riches in this way, it will be a doomsday for 
the nation ! Mr. Hanna has been notably active 
in settling several labor disputes that had led to 
strikes. Workingmen too soon forget such ben- 
efits and remember only the $ marks ! 

During the recent campaign I admired Mr. 
Hanna's frank and bold utterances on the subject 



OTHER ESSAYS. 131 

of industrial organizations. When most of the 
RepubHcan orators were shouting themselves 
hoarse, in their denunciations of "the Trust," 
trying to out-clamor the Democrats and Popu- 
lists who were behowling that much-abused in- 
stitution, Mr. Hanna refused to join the chorus 
for mere political effect. He stood up sturdily, 
and, in plain, blunt, Mark Antony fashion, de- 
clared that the Trust is not a political question ; 
which is undeniably true, as the people must 
sometime learn. It is no more a question for 
politics than is the partnership of a firm of gro- 
cers. "There is just as much Democratic as Re- 
publican money in the Trusts," he declares ; and 
he is in a position to know, if his opponents may 

be believed ! 

The head of the Sugar Trust was asked a few 
years ago, by a Senate Committee, "Do you con- 
tribute to campaign expenses ?" 

"We do." 

"To which party do you contribute?" 

"Depends upon circumstances." 

"To which fund do you contribute in Massa- 
chusetts ?" 

"The Republican." 

"To which in New York?" 

"The Democratic." 

"To which in New Jersey?" 



132 OTHER ESSAYS. 

'T will have to look at the books. That is a 
doubtful State." 

ETHICS FOR THE STATE. 

How shall the State rear up good citizens? 
What shall be its theory of ethics? What in- 
fluences shall it bring- to bear upon the crim- 
inal? These are vital questions^ which our wise 
men must answer wisely, if the State is to per- 
sist. 

There are doubts and questionings in the air. 
The Ten Commandments are no longer blindly 
obeyed merely because they are ancient and ven- 
erable. Men are growing bold, and daring to 
examine all things, even the Sacred Law of old. 

'Thou shalt not steal." Who is this Moses, 
who comes to us with his "Thus saith the Lord" ? 

"Ah, but the jail, the scaffold ; we must respect 
these, even though we repudiate Moses and his 
God, with the Tables of the Law." 

So? and is this at last the safe-guard of the 
State, the foundation of our ethics? Shall Fear 
be the only god in our pantheon whom we must 
at last respect? Then indeed let us arise and 
gird on our armor, for no man's life or estate is 
safe. 

The State knows no ethics. It knows only 
expediency, safety. Its argument is a club, a 



OTHER ESSAYS. I33 

bullet, a jail, a scaffold. It says, "Let a man 
hold what theory he will. We are concerned 
only with his acts. Let him worship God, or 
fellowship with Satan ; hold with Moses and Je- 
sus, or break all the sacred tablets; let him be 
Christian, pagan, scoffer, philosopher, what he 
will; we ask only that he shall abide by our or- 
dinances of public safety. If he steal, and be 
found out, we have our penalty ; but with his re- 
lations to God and his own soul we have no 
business." 

This is a shallow policy, fit only for slaves and 
idiots. Shall not the State deal with man as with 
a living soul? Is man a beast, to be chained, 
caged, beaten into brute submission? Our jails 
are not strong enough to hold this wild beast, 
Man. Our chains snap asunder. Our weapons 
glance and do not kill his wickedness. 

I rejoice that the spirit of man cannot be thus 
tamed and subjugated. I rejoice that there are 
men who break all chains and bars, beat down 
all opposers, and escape to Liberty. The State 
wants citizens, not slaves. Let us have Men, 
not beasts muzzled. 

When you have tamed and broken your wild 
man by these brute methods, what is he? No 
more a man, but a poor craven beast, fit only to 
come and go at some hard master's bidding. 



134 OTHER ESSAYS. 

Your institutions are weakest where you think 
them strongest. Your bad man is caught, your 
worst man remains at large. Your jail holds 
only the weaklings of Satan. His lords and 
barons laugh at your bolts and bars. 

Is there no higher law than these which you 
have written on your statute books? If not, 
alas for the State ! 

What is my remedy? Education, instruction, 
exkortation. The day is past when men can be 
governed by superstition or brute force. The 
Church, the State, were once clothed with ma- 
jesty and power. Men fell down and worshipped 
the one, or stood with bowed head to receive the 
admonition of the other. But for thousands of 
men today priest and king have played their part 
and made their exit from the stage of life. They 
are tolerated, respected, but not feared or 
obeyed. 

The radical citizen demands freedom, in 
thought, speech, action. If he is restricted, he is 
chafed. He will be free, though the State dis- 
solve and the heavens fall. He will respect his 
neighbor's rights, but will assert his own. If the 
Church or the State prohibit him, he demands 
reasons. Failing to receive them, he follows his 
inclinations, but secretly, and with circumspec- 
tion. 



OTHER ESSAYS. i35 

The ideal State is that in which all restraint is 
voluntary self-restraint. All government which 
subjugates is, so far, bad. Its restrictive and pu- 
nitive institutions are a confession of weakness 
and failure. They are evil, even though justi- 
fiable from the standpoint of expediency. 

We must aim higher. We cannot control men 
by physical means alone. Man is a spirit, not a 
body merely. The spirit in men laughs at chains, 
jails, scaffolds. Even the criminal may be a 
transcendentalist, and stand unmoved before 
juries and their verdicts, judges and their de- 
crees. He may break your statute law, and yet 
be a martyr to the law of Freedom. Better a free 
criminal than a caged and fettered saint. 

How to organize these sentiments into a sys- 
tem, how to apply them in the treatment of our 
ignorant and criminal classes, is the duty of the 
statesman. Let us for a time neglect tariffs and 
finances, if we must, and give some attention to 
this vital subject. 

The State must not join hands with an institu- 
tional Church to accomplish this needed work. 
Science and superstition cannot work together. 
But there may be a secular ethics, as there is a 
secular physiology and psychology. Ethics must 
be rooted in the Cosmos, not merely in tradi- 
tional religion. 



136 OTHER ESSAYS. 

If the Laws of the Universe protect and up- 
hold crime, it is futile for either Church or State 
to attempt its eradication. But if there are Laws 
of Right and Wrong in nature, they may be dis- 
covered and taught by the State, as the laws of 
gravity are. 

The State instructs the farmer how to raise 
wheat and corn. Shall it not instruct us how to 
raise Men? It teaches the farmer how to eradi- 
cate weeds and parasites. Shall it not instruct 
us how to eradicate vice and evil ? Are not Men 
the most important crop which can be produced 
in any nation? Let us have a Bureau of An- 
thropology, with daily bulletins. 

THE TYRANNY OF THE TRUST. 

While we are talking about the tyranny of the 
trust, let us not forget that there are many kinds 
of trusts and many kinds of tyranny. 

The workingman, too, has his trust ; namely, 
the labor union ; organized and maintained for 
the benefit of its members, conducted on princi- 
ples no less selfish, no less oppressive to the rest 
of society, than are the principles on which the 
trust of the capitalist is organized. 

Do you not conspire, my good workingmen, do 
you not verily plot together how you may extort 
higher wages from your employer? 



OTHER ESSAYS. 137 

Do you not seek by all means, fair or unfair, to 
get and keep a monopoly of your particular kind 
of labor, to be sold only for such prices as you 
may fix, be the needs of your employer and the 
public what they may? 

Your trust, my good workingman, adopts 
methods which no capitalistic trust has yet dared 
to employ. What capitalistic trust or corpora- 
tion has yet dared to say to the public : *'Buy our 
goods willingly, at our price, or we will force 
you? If you dare to buy elsewhere, or adopt a 
substitute, we will stone you, shoot you, dyna- 
mite your homes, burn and destroy the property 
of those whom you would patronize instead of 
us !" 

And yet^ this is often the policy of working- 
men incited by mistaken leaders. 

You have a right to demand higher wages, my 
friends, and so has the capitalist a right to de- 
mand higher prices for his goods ; but neither has 
a right to coerce the public market. 

So great is the sympathy of the public for 
workingmen, that the tyranny of the labor union 
is tolerated with little criticism, while the capi- 
talistic trust is made the object of universal 
reprobation. 

Let us have fair play, brother. It is a selfish 



138 OTHER ESSAYS. 

struggle on both sides. Let not pot call kettle 
black. 

Out of all this strife, order and justice will 
emerge, if we let the Natural Laws have their 
course. Let your trust fix its prices ; let your 
labor union fix its scale of wages. The public 
will determine whether it will pay these prices. 

Selfishness forever overreaches its own ends. 
When we forget or ignore the Great Laws, and 
seek to rob our brother by injustice, then falls 
our clever scheme, and we are balked. 

So long as the labor union does not try to pre- 
vent the employer from hiring cheaper men, so 
long as the trust does not try to force the public 
to buy certain goods at certain prices, these or- 
ganizations can do no great harm. They may 
make certain demands ; but conditions which they 
cannot control, will determine whether these de- 
mands will be met. 

The price of a thing at last is determined by 
the needs of the purchaser. How much will you 
pay, rather than do without this thing, or use 
something else instead of it? 

Some will pay more than you. Some not so 
much. The )]iean is the maximum price. Above 
this, no trust can force its prices, though it had 
omnipotent power, and all monopoly, and could 
command armies and Senates to aid its purpose. 



OTHER ESSAYS. 139 

How much will you pay for certain labor? 
How much can you pay, considering the state 
of the market for your goods ? 

This is the maximum wage. No labor union, 
no striking or rioting, can force wages above this 
figure, though legions of angels were to help the 
cause of the strikers. 

There are certain Laws, my brother, which 
neither you nor I, nor any workingman nor capi- 
talist, ever made or modified, or ever can. 

Let us get sight of These, and learn to trust 
in Them. They are the Supreme Laws. Be- 
yond Them is no appeal. No man, no deity, can 
set Them aside. When your Labor Union and 
your Trust perceive these Laws and their Ma- 
jesty, there will be less folly to make the angels 
weep. 

OUR BEST DEFENSES. 

The best safeguard of any nation is not its 
army and navy, its police and militia, but its well- 
diffused Productions. 

Our best defenses are not muskets and can- 
non, forts and battleships; but steam engines, 
looms, reapers and threshers, lumber mills, and 
other agencies for the creation of wealth. 

Famine cannot conquer a people who are 



140 OTHER ESSAYS. 

armed with these weapons ; but cannon and mus- 
kets are powerless against such a foe. 

When men are prosperous they are slow to 
mutiny. It is your hungry mobs who overturn 
thrones and senates. When corn is scarce, com- 
plaints are plentiful. These are a crop that 
yields best in years of famine. 

Democracy, or any measure thereof, is safe only 
whilst the people are prosperous and satisfied. 
Let famine appear, and wave his gaunt arms in 
the land, and lo, thousands rally and follow him 
to political folly or fields of riot and bloodshed. 
Those who have bread, however justly they got 
it, shall now surrender it to hungry mobs. Those 
who have plate, silken garments, elegant furnish- 
ings, are somehow conceived to be the authors of 
the people's misery, and on them the wrath- 
storms of the mob do break. 

I do not say that rich men never oppress poor 
men. T do not say that the madness of mobs is 
never justifiable. But I do affirm, and history 
bears me out, that when the common people suf- 
fer, the rich are not the only cause of it. They, 
too, have their privations, in times of panic ; and 
though they have bread to eat, and coal to warm 
them, they do often suffer quite as keenly as the 
poor. 

The poor man, at his humble board, where 



OTHER ESSAYS. 141 

bread and water may be the family fare, does not 
realize what hardships the rich man suffers in 
times of financial depression. He carries bur- 
dens the poor man knows not of. His days are 
feverish with care, and his nights without re- 
freshing sleep. He must think not only of his 
family but of the families of many others who 
depend upon his business for their bread. If he 
fail, scores, perhaps hundreds, fail with him. 

Yet, in the midst of all his trials, when his 
heart and his head ache with the burdens he car- 
ries, the poor man envies him, and sometimes 
plots against his very life. Think of this, broth- 
ers, when you assemble in mad council to de- 
nounce the rich man. Think of this, when you 
are plotting to explode dynamite under his resi- 
dence or factory. 

THE CURE FOR RIOTING. 

There is certainly no excuse for violence in this 
land, in the interests of poor men's rights. If 
men cannot content themselves to get their de- 
sired ends by ballots, shall they be allowed to get 
them by bullets? 

Ballots are bad enough, in the hands of mad- 
men. What shall we do when they resort to 
muskets and dynamite? 

In desperate cases, desperate measures are 



142 OTHER ESSAYS. 

justified, to preserve the peace. If men will not 
be quiet, we must make them so. "He that taketh 
the sword shall die by the sword." When your 
workingmen, or (most likely), your idle men, 
seize arms, to intimidate their employers or other 
workingmen (or men who wish to work), it is 
time that the State should rouse from its torpor, 
and stretch out its arm to protect its loyal sub- 
jects. 

If there must be bloodshed, let there be blood- 
shed. This fever of riot will abate, when suf- 
ficient blood has been let. 

Let the State beware of hasty anger. Let it 
beware of partisanship. But let it not hesitate 
to shed blood in the interests of law and justice. 

We often hear the assertion that the militia is 
never called out in the interests of the working- 
men, but only to protect the property of the rich. 

If this be so, why is it ? 

Surely, because only the property of the rich 
is threatened with destruction ! 

Your mad mobs do not attack and destroy the 
homes of workingmen. If they threaten the lives 
of workingmen it is to prevent them from work- 
ing, when certain other workingmen have struck ! 

In such a case, the State should call its militia, 
to protect the workingmen who wish to work. 

Demagogues call this protecting the employer, 



OTHER ESSAYS. 143 

and intimidating the employees ! So distorted is 
the vision of him who has resolved to look only 
for his own selfish interests ! 

In this Republic, we have agreed to refer all 
questions of politics to the ballot. Since we have 
so compacted, let us abide by our agreement, and 
put down all appeals to violence. 

If we must use artillery in the interests of 
peace, let it be used in time. Let us blow some 
of these wild ruffians into the air, before they 
succeed in blowing other and better citizens 
there ! 

Are these harsh methods, which I propose? 
Then is the knife of the surgeon harsh when 
used to cut out a cancerous or gangrened spot 
which threatens the body's health. 

Our tenderness toward the ruffian may be 
harshest cruelty toward the State. We need 
brave men in executive offices, who will neither 
fear nor flatter the mob. When our public of- 
fices hang upon the favor of mobs, chaos is come. 

Justice flees from the land where her ministers 
dare not defend her. Public peace is not to be 
purchased by timidity or fear. Only the brave 
deserve the boon of peace. Cowards will not 
long enjoy it. 



144 OTHER ESSAYS. 

PRACTICAL WISDOM. 

The value of any man's writing or speaking 
lies in his interpretation of his own experience. 
So far as I can apply wisdom to my own affairs, 
they become of interest and value to other peo- 
ple. If I am overcome and defeated by my af- 
fairs ; if I am utterly routed and driven from the 
field, why should I tell other people how to fight? 

Here is my kitchen, with its multitude of 
problems. Shall I run away from it, and leave 
some poor Bridget to fight the battle? If I do, 
what right have I to complain when victory 
leaves my domestic banners? Why should I de- 
sert my post, and yet expect a barbarian lieuten- 
ant to hold the fort against the enemy? 

Your wisdom, my good philosopher, is halt 
and blind, if it limp and stumble in the kitchen, 
the dining room, the parlor. Let it not go 
abroad, to stalk bravely in public highways, until 
it have learned to use its eyes and legs at home. 
Will you shout in the Senate, good man, and tell 
the Nation how to bake its bread, when you have 
miserably run away from your own kitchen? 
Stand by, stand by^ and see that your own house 
is in order, before you essay to keep house for 
the Nation. 

Good preacher, does your chimney draw? Is 



OTHER ESSAYS. 145 

your cellar sweet and clean? Does your roof 
leak? Look to these things, and then come and 
preach to your people. Do not defer perfection 
even in little things until you get to heaven. Do 
you know how your pie is made? Do you know 
the constitutent elements thereof? Do not ask 
a blessing on your dinner until you have exam- 
ined its credentials. Taste and see that the lard 
is good. Eat no stale meats for conscience' sake. 
The Lord's supper is not more worthy of your 
attention than is the supper served daily at your 
own table. Look to the elements thereof. Do 
not attack original sin while there is anything 
in your pantry which ought to be reformed. Cast 
out the devils from your own house, and then you 
shall have power to cast them out of other 
houses also. 

THE RICHES OF THE POOR. 

It seems to me that the education of any man 
is incomplete, and he is unable to properly appre- 
ciate the blessings of our wondrous civilization, 
who has never lived for a time in a condition of 
semibarbarism. We are born into this heritage 
of the ages, this structure which we call civiliza- 
tion, the accumulated labors of so many cen- 
turies, and we do not properly appreciate it for 
lack of contrast. We think we are poor, and we 



146 OTHER ESSAYS. 

talk of poverty that accompanies progress, and 
many of us bewail our lot, envying our neigh- 
bors their greater possessions. But we do not 
know that the poorest of us is rich, compared 
with the average condition of life a few cen- 
turies ago. It is a characteristic of human na- 
ture that we soon become indifferent to our pos- 
sessions, and however much we have, we cry for 
more. So nimble is the fancy and so insatiable 
are the desires of man, that no condition is so 
good but that we can imagine a better, and no 
wealth so great but that we wish it greater. 

The education of any individual is incomplete, 
then, unless it includes at least a brief experience 
in that primitive life which was the best that 
princes had a few centuries ago. Let a man go 
into the wilderness and pitch his lodge there, 
building with what materials he finds at hand, 
adapting his desires to his facilities, and deter- 
mining within himself to be content with what 
he has, and he will learn lessons that no school 
or college ever taught its pupils. With a little 
canvas, costing perhaps three or four dollars, 
some boards picked up where wind or tide has 
left them^ some rusty nails drawn from these 
same boards, and with none of the tools of civil- 
ization save an axe, a saw, and a hammer, let 
him build a habitation for himself. Let him for 



OTHER ESSAYS. 147 

dishes use sea shells, tin cans, or whatever he 
may find in the back yard of civilization ; let him 
sleep on a bedstead of boards, with perhaps a 
mattress of dried grass ; for chairs, use boxes ; 
for a table, a shelf of boards ; let him, I say, try 
an experiment of this kind, and he will very soon 
realize his immense debt to civilization; the im- 
mense debt of even the poorest man to the past 
ages. And I think that if he has ever complained 
of poverty, he will never do so again, however 
seeming hard his portion in society may be. 

We use our blessings thoughtlessly, carelessly, 
with no proper appreciation of their worth. The 
commonest things in the poorest household rep- 
resent the thought and labor of centuries. From 
the tallow dip to the kerosene lamp is a longer 
way than people who use lamps are commonly 
aware. Give me a list of the things used in the 
poorest household, and I will convince the own- 
ers that they are richer than Julius Caesar was. 
Our young men envy the fame of ancient 
worthies, but lament their own poverty in the 
midst of a wealth such as these same ancients 
never saw. How poor was Homer, Virgil, Cic- 
ero, Demosthenes, Plutarch, not to mention Dio- 
genes, Socrates, Epictetus, compared with the 
poorest schoolboy of today. 

I look over the scanty array of goods in my 



148 OTHER ESSAYS. 

camp, an outfit which would surely entitle me to 
the reputation of poverty in any village or city, 
and I wonder as I look at each article whether 
the civilization of Greece or Rome could have 
furnished anything to be compared with it. First, 
here is this pen with which I am writing, and 
the ink into which I dip it. Instead of steel pens, 
at a penny apiece, the ancient used a stylus, or a 
quill, or a sharpened reed. Instead of a fine 
linen paper, of marvelous texture, he used the 
bark of trees, or the skins of beasts. I thought it 
fine, last summer, in the Adirondacks, to write 
some letters to my distant friends upon white 
birch bark, freshly peeled from the tree. There 
was a poetry in the act, and my words gained 
somewhat, I doubt not, from the fragrance of 
the bark and the atmosphere of the forest which 
it conveyed; but suppose I were compelled al- 
ways to use that bark? suppose it were the only 
available material for books and papers ? I think 
I appreciate my linen paper better after using 
birch bark for a few times. 

Before me lies a box of parlor matches. They 
cost but a penny a box, but what a convenience ! 
Think of the flint and steel, my young friend, 
every time you strike a match, and try to realize 
your advantage over Caesar and Cicero in this 
one respect. On the table lies my watch, ticking 



OTHER ESSAYS. 149 

away the seconds of time. Compare this won- 
drous mechanism with the sundial, the water- 
clock, or the hourglass of the ancients There is 
no home so poor but that the clock is found in it ; 
and yet the home of Virgil, or Caesar, or Cicero 
did not contain that common article. 

On my table are a few books, — only a few, for 
I came out from civilization to get away from 
books and all the cares and anxieties connected 
with them. Think of what is meant by a book, 
even the cheapest, a five-cent pamphlet. It brings 
to mind a whole train of activities which were 
unknown to the ancient world. The typesetter, 
the pressman, the binder, are but three in a thou- 
sand occupations involved in the production and 
delivery of this book. The paper of which it is 
made represents a vast industry, which takes you 
into the cotton fields or the woods for the stock ; 
into the alleys of cities with the rag-picker; into 
the paper mill, the wholesale house, the freight 
car, the express wagon, the printing office ; and 
at last into one of Uncle Sam's mail pouches, 
where the little pamphlet rode safely and swiftly 
to your distant home. 

Think of the train of industries which are in- 
volved in the manufacture of a common pam- 
phlet, I say, and then try to appreciate the art 
which gives you the company of the greatest 



150 OTHER ESSAYS. 

souls in the world's past history. Think of what 

a book meant in ancient times, when all books 

were slowly and toilsomely copied by slaves, and 

often the cost of a single volume would buy a 

modern library. Think of this, I say, when you 

pick up the cheapest pamphlet, and treat it with 

as much reverence as its contents will permit. A 

mere book, without reference to its contents, is a 

thing to be wondered at ; how priceless, then, is 

a good book, which brings to me the thought of 

a great soul. He was himself, perhaps, isolated, 

unsocial, in his own day ; and but for this book, 

even his associates would not have known him 

truly; how great is its value, then, to me, who 

would not even have heard of him, much less 

communed with his immortal thought, were it 

not for this book. 

And so I look over the few articles on my rude 

table, articles which are found in the poorest 

homes in the land, and I find that they connect 

me with a world such as Caesar and Cicero never 

dreamed of, in the splendor of old Roman days. 

I perceive that poverty in the nineteenth century 
is better than was the wealth of the olden times ; 
and as fraternal love increases among men, and 
the benefits of this wondrous civilization are 
more and more diffused among the people, the 
estate of the humblest shall be better than that 
of lords and princes in the ancient world. 



OTHER ESSAYS. 151 

SOCIALISM AND INDIVIDUALISM. 

Our ''advanced thinkers" who are crying for 
Sociahsm should stop and consider the relation 
of majority rule to individual freedom. Social- 
ism, like all other forms of Government control, 
means the domination of the minority by the ma- 
jority. 

The freedom of the minority is something 
which the average Socialist does not consider; 
but it must be considered, and largely realized, by 
any system worthy the name of philosophy. 

A church establishment, supported by the 
State, is one of the most offensive features of this 
sort of ''Government." People who want such 
an establishment should be free to have it, but 
they should also be free to pay for it. Why 
should they tax for its support those who have 
no use for it? In America, we have no State 
church, but we exempt church property from 
taxation, which is another way of compelling 
those who do not want the services of the church 
to help support the institution. The assumption 
is, that all people need the church, and are H- 
rectly or indirectly benefited by its ministrations ; 
and herein is the danger of all such paternalism 
in Government. When one body of people as- 
sume to say what is best for another body of peo- 



152 OTHER ESSAYS. 

pie, they are quite likely to make mistakes ; and 
if they insist upon carrying out their ideas, they 
are quite likely to become tyrannical and op- 
pressive. 

Individual freedom is yet a long way off in 
America, notwithstanding our noisy celebrations 
of Independence. Our Eagle screams vocifer- 
ously, and spreads his broad wings in exultation 
over the Freedom we have achieved ; but those 
who look closest find that our Freedom is yet 
largely an empty name. The fact is, the develop- 
ment of the principle of Freedom among us is 
scarcely yet begun ; and the efforts of socialists 
to make "Government" the owner and manager 
of all things is not in the direction of greater lib- 
erty. 

It is not necessary, even if it were advisable, 
to institute an elaborate socialism, in order that 
''the people" may own and manage the industrial 
resources of the country. The only way for "the 
people" to own and manage industries is to buy 
them, with legitimate money. Let those who 
have money, and who wish to participate in these 
enterprises, acquire stock in them, in a business- 
like manner. Why should I be unwillingly taxed 
to buy stock in a particular industry, any more 
than to buy an interest in a church ? 

If we do not like the prices which a certain 



OTHER ESSAYS. 153 

corporation charges us for its products, we have 
a perfect right to go into business for ourselves, 
or agree to patronize some other corporation. 
We have no right to drive the offending corpora- 
tion out of business by the force of legislation, or 
by condemning and confiscating its property. If 
we must fight the Devil, let us fight him with fire, 
not with holy water. Let us meet him upon his 
own ground, with his own weapons, not appeal 
to mere force of numbers, which is at last an ap- 
peal to arms. 

Ballots at last rest upon bullets. We enact a 
law that the corporation shall sell us its business 
at a certain figure. This means that we will come 
with guns and take this business at this figure, 
if said corporation dare to object to our legisla- 
tion. Is this Justice? Is this Liberty? 

WORLD-CONQUERERS OF TODAY. 

Is it not possible that our traditions of culture 
are somewhat musty and antiquated? For cen- 
turies it has been the habit to cast some reproach 
upon business. Literature^ law, medicine, sci- 
ence, philosophy, have been deemed worthy ob- 
jects for intellectual energy ; but manufacture and 
trade have not been quite respectable. 

Our twentieth century will see a change in 



154 OTHER ESSAYS. 

these traditions. Under the new and complex 
conditions of modern industrial life, business suc- 
cess depends upon intellectual gifts of as high an 
order as were ever required for success in the so- 
called professions. 

The successful merchant or manufacturer of 
today is no village magnate, but a world-con- 
queror, like Alexander or Caesar of old. Vast 
schemes of conquest are planned and carried out 
under his direction. Fleets of ships obey his or- 
ders. Vast systems of railways and telegraphs 
serve his aims. Armies of men await his pleaure. 
Can any common brain command such vast re- 
sources, plan and fitly execute such vast designs ? 

Let me sing thy praises, O man of affairs, im- 
mersed in these wide-throbbing energies. Let 
Virgil sing of arms and the man who wielded 
them ; let me be the bard of the conquerors of 
trade. 

These are the agencies that are redeeming this 
world from savagery and darkness. 'Tis here 
upon this earth that man must find his heaven. 

Withdraw thy gaze, O yearning poet, from the 
cloud-realms of the great beyond. Look here; 
— and in the conquests of science and invention 
thou shalt see the redemption of the race. 

Come forth from thy dim speculations, O mys- 
tic soul, thy search after Spirit and its native 



OTHER ESSAYS. 155 

realm; and see that here upon this time-scarred 
earth are all the forces of the Creative Spirit man- 
ifest. In flower and tree, in bird and beast, in 
all the beauty that doth clothe the earth, thou 
shalt behold the revelations of that Spirit which 
thou art seeking in the dim beyond. 

Here, on this earth, is man's divinest home. 
Around him burst on every side the revelations 
of Creative Life. 

Let us be bold and free, O brothers all ; and 
wait no more for visions from beyond, but turn 
our eyes to see the glories here and now in this 
our living world ! Here is our heaven, here our 
true abode. Here, in the pulsing energies of 
this great world, we shall outwork our highest 
aims. 

Go forth and conquer, O aspiring soul.. Sit 
not at home in idle dreaming. No world is fairer 
than this earth of ours. It calls us from the si- 
lence and the dream, and bids us Act and Con- 
quer. 

Not in the airy nothings of the poet's dream- 
world shall our valor find its free expression ; 
but in this our actual world ; this world of dust 
and smoke, this world of rocks and soil. 

Here is our field of battle. Let us go forth to 
win. We shall not find a worthier field. To 
grasp the plow, to wield the sounding hammer, 



156 OTHER ESSAYS. 

to guide the cunning engine in the mill ; to dig 
and carve and delve ; to plow and execute the 
vast designs of trade ; — these are thy victories, O 
valiant soul, in this our throbbing world. 

MY PHILOSOPHY. 

I am living in this world, and am saturated 
with its Realities. Spectral Other-worlds exist 
not for me, whilst I dwell in this. I eat, drink, 
sleep, breathe, as performing a Divine Ritual. 
These acts to me are highest worship, for 
through them only are all other acts performed. 

The earth, the sea, the sky, are divine. Life 
is a continual miracle. 

I recognize the difference between Noumenon 
and Phenomenon, and know that Diversity is but 
the mask of Unity; but whilst I am myself a 
Phenomenon, I will live true to Phenomena. I 
will not mourn that I cannot adjust the facts of 
the material world to the Laws of the Spiritual. 
I am content to know that each at last consists 
with the other, and that both are one in the Uni- 
versal Order. 

I recognize Appetite, Passion, Desire, Action, 
as attributes of Man in Time, which are not to 
be denied, but guided by Reason. Whilst I am 
here, in the realm of Phenomena, I will live true 
to them, and not accuse my life with continual 



OTHER ESSAYS. 157 

negations and suppressions. I am here to Live, 
not to Die: and Life is Action, not Repression. 

When man has discovered the prime Secret of 
Hfe, namely, that his nature is Spiritual and Uni- 
versal, then first can he rightly live in the Phe- 
nomenal. If he abuse this Secret, by making of 
it a Doctrine, by dwelling in it abstractly, as some 
of the Hindus did, he forfeits his Power, and be- 
comes a Nonentity. His life then is the chief il- 
lusion among all Illusions. 

Air is the life of the body; but shall we stop 
breathing to contemplate that fact? Life for us 
exists only as we appropriate it through Action. 
When we cease to Act, we cease to exist. 

This, then, is my World-philosophy, which I 
propose to live by, and to die by if that be neces- 
sary. 

DIVINE LIFE. 

I am sure that no son of God ever wrought in 
more divine elements than these by which we are 
surrounded here. I am sure that the miracles of 
Christ were no greater ones than these that we 
common mortals perform in our every-day tasks. 

The forces that ally themselves with the work 
of the laborer today are the same that Christ com- 
manded, the same that Moses wrought upon in 
his Egyptian marvels; and though the ends be 



158 OTHER ESSAYS. 

different, the power that uses them is ever the 
same. 

Do not, O zealous preacher, separate these acts 
of common humanity from the reahn of miracle ! 
Do not say, Christ wrought miracles, but all 
other men perform common acts. All the acts 
of man are miracles. 

Who can explain the simplest act of any man? 
A shovel full of dirt is composed of most won- 
drous potencies. These atoms vibrate to unseen 
and unknown forces. The forces of the stars 
play upon them ; gravity, saturating all the infi- 
nite spaces, saturates this dirt also, and binds it 
to the distant stars ; love and hate play among 
these atoms ; attraction and repulsion ; they are 
Alive and Conscious ; they know their place, and 
keep it ; they obey the word of Creative Life, and 
rise to clothe the Thoughts of God in beauty. 
They play at transformation constantly, and take 
now one form, now another; and they form in 
the course of the circling ages the countless 
masks worn by the ever-changing Spirit of Life. 
One endless flux, one never-ceasing round of 
change, engages them. Who shall say that they 
are common and cheap? Who shall scorn them, 
in their humblest form? They are Divine. Let 
us handle them with reverence. 

It is our blindness that makes the world com- 



OTHER ESSAYS. 159 

mon, and our life cheap and uninteresting. It is 
our ignorance that leads us to place divinity else- 
where, to think of God as afar off, in some other 
world, any other than this in which we now dwell. 

God (that is but one name for it) is the Spirit 
that is in all things, in every place ; and it is re- 
vealed only by this spiritual perception. The 
perception of the ancient seer can not reveal God 
to us of today. We may or may not believe their 
report ; the fact remains that we must see God 
with our own eyes before we can know that He 
exists. 

Books do not reveal God. They only record 
the revelations which other men enjoyed, 
through their vision ; and if we would know that 
God Is, we must see Him as these other il- 
lumined men saw Him. 

What we commonly call belief in God is only 
belief in a tradition. We hear that Moses saw 
God, that Jesus knew Him, and we accept these 
reports, in the faith of our simple hearts. But 
we do not thus believe in God. 

The true aim of religion is not to teach men 
that God revealed Himself to Moses, or some 
other man of old ; but to show how they may see 
Him for themselves today. When we ourselves 
have seen God, we can very well spare the vision 
of Moses. We are not then deeply concerned to 



i6o OTHER ESSAYS. 

know whether Moses really saw Him. We do 
not care whether Moses was a man or a tradition ; 
whether Christ Jesus was a person or an ideal ; 
for we have now gained through our own facul- 
ties what these men are supposed to reveal 
unto us. 

Thus the true Bible is life itself, — the sincere, 
earnest, illumined life, in which man dwells con- 
stantly with the Divine Spirit, and reads the reve- 
lations of Its presence in all the forms of nature. 

There are other worlds in this universe, other 
lives for man ; but there is no world in which 
God dwells more truly than in this one, and no 
life in which the soul can know God by methods 
different from those by which He is known here 
and now. We think, or are told, that when we 
go to heaven^ we shall see God. But if we see 
Him anywhere in this universe, it will be through 
that spiritual perception which is ours to use 
here and now. 

When we truly see and know God, science can 
never take our knowledge from us. Then, the 
more we know of nature, the more we shall see 
of God. Every truth of science then becomes a 
revelation. Science may well deny the doctrines 
of God which the church too often teaches ; but 
the work of true science is a never-ending un- 



OTHER ESSAYS. i6i 

veiling of God; a ceaseless revealing of His 
Presence in the world. 

Science does not speak of God in the language 
of the Church, and so the Church does not under- 
stand her; but the Church must learn the lan- 
sruaee of science. Then she will understand the 
gospel of Nature, and find a tongue in every tree, 
a book in every running brook, telling of the God 
whose Spirit is the Life in all living things. 

What we need to save us from atheism is not 
a better theology, but a better perception ; a per- 
ception to which God is as patent as the light of 
day; by which we live in the Divine Presence, 
and feel that Holy Spirit which has inspired all 
true Scriptures in the past. We ask the Church 
for God, and she points to the past. She should 
point to the present. 

MIRACLES OF MAN. 

Yesterday I saw the huge engines at the city 
water works. Here is the mighty heart which 
sends the blood of the great city pulsing through 
its arteries. Like the revolution of a planet is the 
mighty wheel in its ceaseless motion. Here are 
Miracles! Men prate of ancient miracles, and 
think this age profane. Never before were such 
Miracles ! 

Here is a Church. Here is Holy Water, to 



i62 OTHER ESSAYS. 

bless the people. Yon sooty engineer is the High 
Priest in this temple of Man. Look, ye wor- 
shippers of musty traditions, ye backward-look- 
ers toward tombs and sepulchres, here is a Liv- 
ing Deity ! The Fire-gods are here, roaring in 
yonder furnaces. The Water-gods are here, 
sporting in their native element. Here are occult 
powers, gods and demons of old Chaos, bound 
Sampson-like to turn the mills of men. 

Who would see Miracles ? Let him enter here 
and look. The "Son of God" could not work 
such Miracles ! The world needed these Mira- 
cles. The Silence spoke not. Jesus came, suf- 
fered, disappeared; but squalor and want re- 
mained. Jesus spoke words. These men have 
done great deeds. 

In this Church there is no creed, no liturgy; 
but Works. The world has had faith, but faith 
without Works is dead. By such Works shall 
Man be saved, not by faith alone. Yet still the 
masses worship the musty miracles of old. 

Look at these wondrous engines, ye foolish 
worshippers ! Did your "saviour" make such 
things ? You say he could turn water into wine. 
Here is your Water-Miracle! This gives 
drink to a City. And did not God make these 
wondrous engines? Yea, verily. God made 
them ; for what God is there but this that works 



OTHER ESSAYS. 163 

and speaks in Man? This is the God that made 
and maketh all things ; worlds, trees, beasts, men, 
and the works of men. 

I speak not in parables, to astonish and con- 
fuse. I speak plain words, to enlighten men. 
This wondrous engine is part of the moving 
Universe. It is one with the Machinery of the 
Stars. The same Intelligence produced this 
which produced sun and moon. I will not wor- 
ship your god, my zealous brother, for he is a 
poor, impotent thing sitting in abject idleness on 
a distant throne. My God is Alive in all things 
that live and act. I cannot go from His Pres- 
ence, nor escape the sound of His Voice. I hear 
it in the hum of wheels, in the puffing of 
great engines, in the sound of winds and waters, 
in the notes of birds, in the voice of man. Your 
god has been silent these hundreds of years. If 
he is alive, let him speak. If he is not impotent, 
let him do something to help his children. Keep 
silence, brother ; if god is alive, he can make him- 
self known. He does not need your apologies. 

Do you not see that you are merely drawing 
the people's attention to yourself? The god you 
speak of is a myth to them. You cannot prove 
his existence by words. Point to his works. 
What are these? Are they some ancient mira- 
cles? Who, or what, then, is working these 



i64 OTHER ESSAYS. 

Miracles of today ? What makes the grass grow, 
the flowers blossom? What makes the egg 
hatch, and the mother bring forth her young? 
What makes the seed germinate, and the corn 
grow? 

Ah, my brother, you do not know? Then 
cease your chatter about "god." Pore no more 
over musty books, seeking a record of what some 
other has seen and known of God. Look around 
you, and you shall see God for yourself. Then 
you can speak as one having authority, and not 
merely as the scribes. 

This is the Gospel not of prayers, not of psalm- 
tunes and muttered words merely, but of Work. 
He who works, shall preach this Gospel. He 
who invents, creates, controls, shall be an apostle 
of this Gospel. His intimate relation to this 
God, the indwelling of this God in him, shall be 
shown by the works he does. The miracles of 
old Gospels shall be but vain and startling magic- 
shows, compared with the miracles of these mod- 
ern Sons of God. These are your real miracles, 
— these wondrous engines, machines, inventions. 
Watt, Stephenson, Morse, Edison, Bell, — these, 
and their like, are your true workers of miracles. 
Their miracles are permanent. Their gift in- 
deed descends to their disciples, and to all pos- 
terity. 



OTHER ESSAYS. 165 

THE VOICE OF LOVE. 

What husband has forgotten the soft tones 
with which he wooed and won his maiden love? 
He would no sooner have wounded her tender 
heart with cold and cruel words than he would 
have smitten her blushing cheek with his 
clenched hand. 

The warbling of robins and blue birds, the soft 
cooing of doves, are harsh beside the thrilling 
tones of the lover's voice, uttering the affections 
of his heart. Why should the voice ever lose 
those musical tones, and acquire the harsh growl 
of the tiger? 

The red bow of the lips should never shoot 
the fire-tipped arrows of hate and wrath, but 
only the rose-wreathed darts of love. 

Listen to the young mother singing her lullaby 
over the cradle of her first-born. Like ripples of 
joy upon a sea of peace the notes of her song 
float out upon the air, and the spirit of the babe 
is lulled into happy rest. No song of angels be- 
fore the dread Jehovah's throne was ever half 
so beautiful and sweet as the song of a mother 
singing to her child. The golden harps of 
heaven might well be used to sound an accom- 
paniment to such a song. 

But why should this divine, angelic music ever 



i66 OTHER ESSAYS. 

die out of the mother's voice? Why should it 
not sound forever new and sweet in the ears of 
the child, the youth, the growing man? 

Why should the harsh hand of passion ever 
smite the golden chords of the heart, and change 
the harmonies of love into the discordant notes 
of anger? Is this high music of love too fine 
for earth, that it should so soon die out of hu- 
man souls? Must we wait for heaven to fill our 
souls with that sweet music? Why may we not 
fill the earth with this divine melody, so that hu- 
man life everywhere shall harmonize with the 
soft notes of birds, the rustle of winds through 
leafy boughs, and the chiming music of waves 
upon the beach? 

The lark and the mocking bird daily set the 
pitch for us, to which our voices should be tuned ; 
but alas ! we heed them not. 

The stars look down on us to admonish us that 
there is music among the spheres, tho' earth's air 
be filled with discords. The stellar spaces are 
full of music, tho' our souls be empty of it. 

Among the glad harmonies of Creation, that 
have rolled thro' time and eternity, the song of 
the human soul should be the gladdest and sweet- 
est of all. Man should be a pipe for the spirit 
of the Most High to breath its melodies on and 
through. Let us often affirm this truth, and lis- 



OTHER ESSAYS. 167 

ten for the earthly echoes of that celestial music, 
and the air of earth shall be laden with harmony. 
Divine voices shall speak and sing to us, and we 
shall know that Life is one with Joy. 



FROM "SOCIAL LAWS." 

The following paragraphs are selected, almost 
at random, from SOCIAL LAWS, a new and 
timely book by Solon Lauer, author of "Mark 
Hanna, a Sketch From Life ; and other Essays ;" 
"Life and Light from Above;" etc., etc. Nike 
Publishing House, Cleveland, O. 

THE SPIRIT OF ANARCHY. 

Though there are comparatively few persons 
in the United States who are painfully poor, there 
are probably several millions who think them- 
selves so. They compare their possessions with 
the possessions of the wealthy, and their envy 
is aroused. They forget that wealth is not the 
only thing unequally distributed in this world; 
that power, health, wisdom, talent, virtue are also 
distributed with most emphatic partiality. They 
see this inequality of wealth, and, inflamed by the 
incendiary appeals of "reformers," they begin to 
complain, and to covet the wealth of their more 
fortunate neighbors. 

"This belongs to us ! It has been stolen from 
us by these robbers ! It is right for us to seize 
it, to reclaim it !" 

The conservative socialist advises to reclaim it 
by legislation ; the anarchist, by force. 



^'Voting is an illusion," says the anarchist ; and 
at last the people are convinced. Then torch and 
musket, bomb and cannon, perform what ballots 
could not do ; and the hell of revolution is at 
hand. 

BANISH VIOLENCE. 

The guarantee of better times for you, my 
friends, is in no manner of legislating, no sort of 
instituted socialism ; but in the eternal Laws, 
which rule all things. These Laws will befriend 
you, if you get yourselves upon their side. Put 
away torches, muskets, bombs; burn your in- 
flammatory papers, which do but bring the fires 
of hell into your hearts and homes; send your 
loud-mouthed orators to Africa, where, amid des- 
ert sands, they may harangue and mutually de- 
vour one another, to your relief and eternal 
salvation; and then do you begin to practice in- 
dustry, economy, temperance, virtue, patience. 
Before you know it, the Kingdom has arrived. 

I love you all, my brothers, but I will not flatter 
you. I will not join in your savage outcry against 
capital. I know your sorrows, for I have suf- 
fered most of them. I know the pinching grasp 
of poverty. I know what it is to labor and to 
wait. I know there are unworthy rich, — fools, 
sensualists,— -clad in gay apparel, and dwelling 
in fine houses, feeding on the very essence of the 



world's products, but rendering to mankind noth- 
ing in return ; slothful and vicious persons, living 
upon their patrimony, while you must earn your 
daily bread by the distillation of your very blood. 
I know that hunger and disease, poverty and 
squalor, stalk abroad in this great land of ours, 
and flaunt their rags in the very faces of these 
luxurious fops. But shall we, because of these 
things, shriek at Fate, curse Government, impre- 
cate Capitalists, cry "Burn! kill! destroy?" 

THE GOOD DESTINY. 

Slowly the methods of industry are perfecting, 
not through mad shouting of orators or fierce 
scribbling of editors ; but through the experience 
of bunness men themselves. Not these loud brawl- 
ers, not these wild-eyed scribblers, not these in- 
cendiary and bomb-armed anarchists shall bring 
about the consummation devoutlv to be wished; 
but these very Capitalists, these Ogres, these De- 
mons, these Cut-throat Robbers, these Carcasses 
whom you revile, they are to be your saviours. 
Crucify them not. Ye know not what ye would 
do ! They are not gods, they are not saints ; we 
will grant, if you please, that many of them are 
selfish, cruel, hard, Egyptian task-masters; yet 
through such means doth the Destiny that rules 
the world work out its intended Good to all. 



THE MONOPOLY OF GENIUS. 

The gifts of genius can never be distributed by 
laws. Anarchy may destroy, but can never dis- 
tribute them. Who gave Shakespeare his dra- 
matic genius? Imagine a company of his con- 
temporaries rising up, and with endless discord- 
ant clamor demanding an equal distribution of 
his gifts ! 

''Down with Shakespeare! He has absorbed 
the wit and fancy of a whole generation into his 
ponderous brain! We are poor. Our wits are 
lean. With all our scratching, of heads and 
pens, we write no Hamlet, no Macbeth. All 
laurels are laid at his feet. We get none at all. 
He is a Monopolist ; a tyrant of the empire of In- 
tellect. Let us abolish him, that we may all be 
Shakespeares !" 

"You caricature our arguments," protests the 
socialist; "this is manifest absurdity and mad- 
ness !" 

Ah! The reductio ad absurdum! Not more 
absurd is this demand, that the gifts of literary 
and musical genius should be equally distributed, 
than the demand which socialism makes, that the 
gifts of commercial genius shall be made common 
to all men. 

To be sure, we do not hear these Higher 
Things so clamored for ! The wisdom of a Soc- 
rates, the virtue of a Jesus, the genius of a Bee- 



thoven, a Raphael, a Shakespeare, we do not 
cry out for, and demand the distribution of! 
Well for us were it if these things might become 
common ! The race sadly needs these things ; but 
it cries out only for lower things ! 

All genius is one. The power to organise and 
conduct vast industries is as much a gift of na- 
ture as is the power to write great dramas, or 
compose sublime symphonies. Though it wreak 
itself upon things rather than thoughts, it is yet 
Genius ; incommunicable, undistributable, above 
legislation, above mobs. Envy may reach at it, 
but can never grasp it. Hate may destroy it, 
but can never share it. Because it is Power, it 
will forever rule, in selfishness or love. 

THE POOR MAN'S AGE. 

All the institutions of the state and modern city 
exist to the advantage of the poor man, but are 
supported chiefly by the middle and upper classes. 
The man who owns no foot of land walks over the 
city's well-paved streets, enjoys its parks, its pub- 
lic libraries, its free lectures, and other benefi- 
cent institutions, though he pays no dollar to sup- 
port them. It is the poor man's age. Never be- 
fore was the poor man so rich a man; never be- 
fore did he enjoy so many benefits for which he 
does not pay; never before could he buy so many 
useful and beautiful things for his dollar; and yet, 



on every hand rises the cry, ''The poor man is 
oppressed, is robbed, is enslaved to cruel mas- 
ters!" On every side rise up blatant "reform- 
ers," inciting these "poor men" to riot, revenge, 
and robbery. 

WAGES FOR BRAIN WORKERS. 

Shall business managers, in that socialistic 
golden age, manage business for fun? 

"They shall have a salary." 

Are not wages, my brother, for boss and work- 
man alike, regulated by the law of supply and 
(Jemand ? When you can get these business man- 
agers on better terms, by all means get them. 
What hinders that you get them jwwf Ah! 
They are scarc-e, and come high ! There are a 
million moulders or pork-packers to one Carnegie 
or Armour. These latter, then, must have good 
pay. Are they not worth their price? They do 
not compel us to pay them these high wages. 
We pay because their services are cheap at the 
price. A Paderezvski is not protected by laivs or 
trusts; he enters into no conspiracy with other 
musicians to force up the price of tickets. Yet 
he grozvs rich on the voluntary tributes of the 
people who go to his recitals. Genius of any sort 
is at last ivorth the highest price the zvorld zvill 
pay for its services. Shall Paderewski hire him- 
self to a socialistic community of music-lovers, to 



play to them on a small salary ? Until Paderew- 
skis are more common can any socialism bring 
down their wages to the price of a street-organ 
grinder ? 

THE DUCK WITH OXE DUCKLING. 

There is in these days of quacks one species 
of quacking which is especially loud and clamor- 
ous; namely, the quacking of the Duck with the 
single Duckling. "Quack, quack; quick, quick; 
see my duckling : see my fine duckling ! Here is 
your saviour, all ye ducks that have no duck- 
pond; all ye ducks that have not com enough; 
quack, quack : quick, quick !'' 

And at the sound of this quacking all bereaved 
and complaining ducks waddle quickly to see this 
young messiah, who is to restore all duck-ponds 
to their original owners, the Ducks ! With great 
clamor and flapping of wings, with much stretch- 
ing of necks and gapmg of bills, these pondless 
ducks gather round the proud mother-duck, who 
straightway, with such oracular gabblings as 
have never before been heard in all Duckdom, 
proceeds to show how this her young offspring, 
hatched from an Qgg of her own laying, shall 
lead all ducks to water, which shall be thence- 
forth theirs, theirs, to paddle in forevermore! If 
any unfeathered biped shall thenceforth want this 
water, to sail his ships on, or to turn his turbine 



wheels, he shall pay huge tribute to these Ducks, 
whose occupancy gives this water all its worth ! 
All expense of Duckdom — coops, corn, repairs 
of pond — shall be paid out of this tribute money. 
Thus shall all Ducks be happy and prosperous, 
and enabled, with protruding crops and well- 
brushed, waggling tail-feathers, to waddle about 
quacking-out their contentment as Ducks were 
ordained to do by the Creator of all Ducks ! 

LAND WIXXERS AXD LAND OWNERS. 

"The land belongs to the people !" exclaim all 
socialists, whether they swear "by George" or 
"by Jove." 

And who are the people? we must ask again. 
The people ! Is this some fanciful, airy race, 
floating over our real and actual race, like the 
gods of old Greece? Now it appears, now it is 
gone ! Brother, it is a word used to juggle with ! 
There is no such " people!" There are individuals, 
— men — strong, hairy, laboring and thinking men 
— with hearts of flesh, and hot red blood in their 
veins ; with brains, more or less, in their round, 
bony skulls ; but this "people" is a myth. Who 
chop the trees, grub the brush, burn off the na- 
tive growth and plough up the wild land? Is it 
the "people?"' No, brother, this work is done 
by certain men, of strong, brawny frame, of 
brave, stout -beating heart. They do indeed ozvn 



this land; they win it, not from mere wild In- 
dians, but from wild Nature herself, by a valor 
greater than that of armed soldiers. Shall they 
not hold this land as theirs, bequeath it to their 
children, sell it to other men, or do with it as 
we all do with our own? 

While lands and lords exist there will be land- 
lords. See how your magic works its own defeat. 
You tax John Smith, landlord. Does John Smith 
pay this tax? Not a penny of it, not a penny 
of it, my man. The merchant who has his store 
on this lot, does he pay this tax ? Not a penny of 
it. To be sure. Smith the landlord hands this 
money to the tax-collector ; Brown the merchant 
hands the like amount to Smith ; but where does 
Brown get it? From the added prices of his 
goods. Who then pays this tax? Not Smith 
nor Brown, but the dear people! Verily, the 
dear people, my man ! 

INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION. 

Every new machine has been met with mingled 
blessings and curses. There are those today 
who denounce machinery; who would destroy it 
all, in the supposed interests of manual workers, 
and send the human race back to semi-barba- 
rism. Not so is the hand of progress moved for- 
ward upon the dial of human life. The principle 
of economy of production is a safe and good prin- 



ciple, wherever it is applied; whether through 
machinery or through industrial organization. 
It means at last, if not at first, better and cheaper 
prodticts for all the sons of men. 

If laborers are free to combine, in the interests 
of higher wages, why may not capitalists unite, 
even in the interests of higher prices? If we are 
to prohibit the latter by law, why not the former? 

NATURAL ARISTOCRACY. 

We want no mere mob rule in America. Let 
Kings rule, as is their natural right. The value 
of our Institutions consists in this, that they per- 
mit the true King, the natural ruler, to reach and 
ascend his rightful throne. 

We must not flatter the mob, more than the 
monopolist. Let our speech be such as can be 
heard by both, even though acceptable to neither. 
It is not popular to defend the Capitalist. I do 
not say he should always be defended ; but he 
should have justice done him — he should have his 
case fairly stated. 

These men exist from Nature, not from our 
industrial institutions. They rule because they 
are born to do so. Sceptres belong to those who 
can wield them, not to those whose palms itch 
for them. Though these men were all killed, Na- 
ture would send more such to rule the masses. 
These frogs need a king, though not one that 



shall eat them up. No frog can rule the frogs, 
though he puff himself never so big. Under 
whatever disguise, we find that Power rules. 

SATAN'S WILES. 

Poor man, I know that often the tears of sor- 
row dim thine eyes ; that often the dust and smoke 
of the factory dim them, so thou canst not see the 
truth. Thou canst not see and understand these 
Laws that rule thee over thy head. Thou art 
engaged in tasks. Thou hearest the cry of thy 
desires, and the desires of thy loved ones. Thou 
seest rich men eating and drinking what thy 
poverty has denied to thee. Thou seest them in 
fine houses, rich apparel, which thou canst not at- 
tain. Is it to be wondered at that thou listenest 
to the voice of the tempter, the cry of the *'re- 
former," who promises thee all these fine king- 
doms of the earth if thou wilt but worship him? 
I say unto thee, my friend, bid him sternly get 
behind thee. 



31^77-2 



